Essay: Asteroid City (2023)
Wes Anderson: Cynical? or just insane?
Asteroid City (2023)
Written and directed by Wes Anderson
A few dozen people find themselves stranded, then detained, in a tiny desert settlement in September 1955. They include five teenagers who are the finalists in some kind of science contest, and their parents. There's also 10 children and their teacher on a field trip to a nearby crater -- the site of a long-ago meteorite impact, and here the site of the science fiesta -- as well as a cowboy band that is left behind by a quick-departing bus. Finally, there are three five-year-old girls who belong to one of the science fair parents, and their grandfather, who comes along to rescue them when their family's car breaks down.
To this somewhat promising setup, the writer and director Wes Anderson has provided not one, but two frames. The first to be established is that we, the movie audience, are really watching a television presentation. The TV show concerns not the story of the people in the desert but the origins of a stage play -- that's the second frame. The contents of the play are the events in the desert setting, featuring the characters described above. Got that? Three layered realities: the TV ur-frame; the play that is the subject of the TV show; and the contents of the play, which are set in the desert.
To say this framing is unnecessary is an understatement; it simply wastes time with events supposedly taking place "backstage" and is narrated documentary-style (all this is in black and white, to differentiate it from the desert sequences which appear in surreal, bright pastels). These framing sequences have scraps of stories of their own, but these scraps don't congeal into a meta-narrative. They're more like backstory notes scribbled by the screenwriter and retained in the final product, for no reason I could discern.
Does the notion of an enclosing meta-narrative have anything to do with the themes touched on by the desert scenes? No, it doesn't. Do the relationships between the "playwright" and the actors inform those between the main characters? Again, no.
Maybe they needed the material, such as it is, to round out the film's running time. Because the story of the people who find themselves stuck in Asteroid City is more or less unelaborated. One of the parents, a photographer (Jason Schwartzman), occupies the motel cabin next to the one occupied by another parent, who is also a movie star (Scarlett Johansson). They chat through their respective back windows and are never shown to touch -- although one of them says that another character "saw us last night," suggesting that something happens between them, if only for a night.
Their teenaged children do have a romance; at least they get a screen kiss. The other budding romance is between the schoolteacher (of the ten kids on a field trip), played by a poised Maya Hawke wearing gorgeous 50s dresses, and one of the singing cowboys (Rupert Friend). Also — I'm not spoiling anything here, it's shown in the film's trailer — an alien ship from outer space lands and disrupts the science fair, causing the military to quarantine everybody for a while.
But these narrative feints are themselves merely background to the director's main focus. It's this: to photograph every scene imposed upon an invisible grid composed of 90- and 45-degree angles.
Anderson's films have been growing more and more angular, and symmetry in the frame is his signature. But in this movie, it gets totally out of hand. He not only makes a virtue of symmetry but uses props and set elements to underscore the compositions. Look at these children in the image below, cunningly arranged in the center of the frame, while identical structures loom on either side of their grouping. To emphasize the angular schema, the sequence that introduces the film’s primary setting sets the camera down in the center of town and then pans and tracks in a mechanized, almost robotic manner. This business stops being cute very early in the movie, but it continues with a life of its own.
And I'll say this: a desert setting is absolutely not flat and angular. When you're in a desert, the thing that strikes you most is the curvature of the land. More than anything else, you can see plainly that the desert floor is an ancient sea bottom. And desert towns are not straight and angular either; they're composed of shabby, ramshackle buildings that lean and fall apart, situated at random angles to the highway or road they're on.
So what we really have here is a cartoon setting with humans arranged in it like members of a marching band. (The homage to the "Roadrunner" cartoons is made clear, as an obviously animated roadrunner, looking nothing like the real bird, occasionally darts in and out. The buttes and mesas looming in the background are also derived from that cartoon world.)
Some of the actors get a chance to act, although Anderson has obviously imposed a flattening effect on every line of dialogue. Characters speak archly, sarcastically, or like androids. Everyone is deadpan, even Johansson, though she never gives a bad performance and manages, even while looking straight into the camera most of the time, to transmit actual emotion.
I racked my brains to find some meaning to this movie. I had thought, perhaps wrongly, that the days of presenting an entirely alienating production for the sake of telling viewers that culture is shit and that they are mere prisoners in a blindly stumbling sequence of random events, were behind us, but that seems to be the real point of the film. Alternately, I suspect that Wes Anderson is simply a somewhat insane individual whose compulsive fixations are overtaking his ability to present a coherent story.
Whatever the explanation, I think that if you go in with low expectations of being mildly entertained and suspend all memories of a cinema which could inform or inspire or even just make you laugh and cry, you might enjoy the pastel tones.