Wes Anderson’s poetic post-Covid nostalgia only seems precious.
Set in 1955, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City is his first good period film, a conceit that indicates escapism and nostalgia. Those interests made Anderson’s earliest films (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic, and The Darjeeling Limited) irresistibly moving. But the palpable sentimentality and need for retreat in Asteroid City make it seem as precious and limited as Anderson’s detractors once alleged. And yet, something genuine is expressed here. To borrow a Max Ophuls phrase, Asteroid City is superficially superficial.
Anderson’s Fifties is introduced by recognizably alienated artists (playwright Edward Norton, TV commentator Bryan Cranston) who attempt to define their place in the era through a documentary program about theater. This turns into a big-screen performance piece, a movie within a movie: Broken families and a busload of tourists and school kids visit a Midwestern military bomb-testing base that was established where an asteroid had penetrated the atmosphere, leaving a large, mysterious crater, thus Asteroid City. The base and tourist site are operated by government personnel and local entrepreneurs whose particular customs and habits reflect back the private and cultural obsessions initially introduced.
This deliberately eccentric, pastel vision is so overtly stylized — distant John Ford mountains as flat as stage scenery, Wild West exteriors reduced to the two-dimensional limits of a ViewMaster stereopticon — that it nearly distracts from the poignant domestic complications that used to be Anderson’s special insight into human relations.
Asteroid City combines the suspense of playing a family board game with TV lore (a mash-up of Gore Vidal’s Visit to a Small Planet and a Playhouse 90 presentation of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town), featuring meticulous animated details. Each transition is presented in a different screen size. Separate sequences (including title-cards and intermission as at a theater program) emphasize the multimedia contrivance. For a lapsed Andersonian like me, this prismatic approach to storytelling is so virtuosic that I suspected he was just showing off again, as in his previous annoying, enervating extravaganzas The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, and The French Dispatch.
Yet Asteroid City’s artifice is so transparent that we can see past the obvious careerism that has marred Anderson’s latest endeavors — the all-star casts (Norton, Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Willem Dafoe, Jeffrey Wright, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Liev Schreiber, Margot Robbie, and Tom Hanks standing in for Bill Murray) that smack of the Hollywood elitism and social-climbing he shares with his colleague and sometime co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach. Despite these stunt characterizations and fussy narrative tricks, Anderson retrieves the signature farcical context that once felt profoundly personal.
The fact that everything looks toylike and distanced in Asteroid City might be the point of that Atomic Age sci-fi title, recalling an America under threat of the Bomb, yet emotionally blasted — alienated — by insecurity and faithlessness. Anderson uses the accoutrements of childhood to convey the sense of a haunted, spiritually vacant country. Like America’s other out-of-touch filmmakers (Spielberg, Scorsese, Alexander Payne, Spike Jonze, the Coen Brothers, David Gordon Green, Jared Hess), Anderson had lost sight of his original inspiration. But now, this childlike artiste’s Ground Zero vision syncs with post-Covid America.
Think of Asteroid City as a stylized hypothesis concocted to scrutinize the state of a fallen society. The best scenes — Schwartzman and Hanks grieving while “saying the same thing”; a father and son truly recognizing each other for the first time; an actress and a photographer revealing themselves at a distance; an actor envisioning his departed soul mate; and brainiac kids trying out their smarts — are among Anderson’s finest. They’re breathtaking moments that piece back together the pure, childlike innocence we miss now more than ever.
When sequestered vacationers are notified that “the president lifted the quarantine,” Anderson’s reference to the Covidapocalypse is culture shock — more effective than Baumbach’s failed adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise and better than the nihilistic sci-fi of Jordan Peele’s Nope.
An American visionary, Anderson embraces his bourgeois adolescence with poetic accuracy: a boy floating forward to give help; a girl raising her hand to ask a question; a general revealing his ethnically specific history; everyone dumbfounded by an extraterrestrial’s appearance. These uncanny instances also reveal the uneasy experiences and sensitivity that various characters articulate as “tragic calamity” and “strategically wounded.” Anderson had made that subtext too obvious in the slightly smug Moonrise Kingdom and the preening nastiness of The Grand Budapest Hotel.
No doubt the psychic wounds of the Covidapocalypse necessitated that Anderson create a fresh cosmology — like his witty fantasy of Broadway marquees: Death of a Narcissist, Circle the Wagons, Fruit of a Withering Vine, Asteroid City. In the film’s curtain-call finale, Actors Studio hopefuls chant and repeat “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.” Anderson’s story-time nostalgia salutes guilelessness and yearning.