Justin Jacobs

I’m a fair weather Wes Anderson fan. If I had to think of a pecking order of today’s great filmmakers, Anderson would probably be somewhere on the second or third tier under the likes of Scorsese, Nolan, Fincher and Tarantino. That said, I don’t think there’s a filmmaker, living or dead, with a better sense of their personal style than Anderson. If I could go to a museum and just look at stills of a movie from any director, this would be my guy.  His work is the embodiment of One Perfect Shot. 

It’s fun to ask people about what their favorite Wes Anderson film is. His works are so varied that you can easily fall into a Rushmore Camp, or a Life Aquatic Camp or even a Fantastic Mister Fox Camp. Other than maybe Isle Of Dogs, which is not a bad movie, there are zero misses in the oeuvre. Anderson’s last film, The French Dispatch, was kind of a microcosm of everything I love about and hate about his modern stuff. I think it’s a movie filled with brilliant vignettes, Jeffrey Wright gives an incredible performance. But when it misses, it airballs. It just struck as a movie more concerned with how many plates it could get spinning than telling a story with enough heart to be memorable. 

In a lot of ways I feel like Asteroid City is a correction to the French Dispatch. Anderson is still showing off in the way the film is presented. The film’s premise is that we are watching a television show, narrated by Bryan Cranston, about a playwright who is trying to finish a new work about a group of genius children who are summoned into the desert for a Stargazers conference where they will receive an award for their ingenuity. While all of these families are in Asteroid City an event happens (no spoilers) that keeps everyone stuck there for a week. Some shenanigans ensue, but eventually everyone is able to go home. The reason they are stuck is not as important as how the characters spend their time together in this tiny town in the desert. 

You can’t talk about a Wes Anderson movie without talking about set design, framing, and establishing shots.  You would think that having your film set in a desert may not provide enough visual splendor for a Anderson flick, but the orangish-pink sands contrasted by the bluest skies you’ve ever seen is one for the coolest backdrops to any of his works. As Anderson is wont to do, many of the scenes start as a long establishing shot, which lets us take in the grandeur of the scenery, before the camera pulls in on the action. 

The call sheet in this movie is one of craziest you will ever see. Tom Hanks is in this movie, and he’s great, but he’s really just a role player. It’s Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson who really steal the show. I love that both Schwartzman and Cillian Murphy both gave their best performances of their careers this year after making so many films with the same director. While Murphy probably gives the more Oscar worthy (one may say bombastic), showy performance in Nolan’s Oppenheimer, I really loved how stripped back and lowkey Schwartzman plays Augie Steenbeck. 

Early in the film we learn about the death of Augie’s wife, and how he has told his four children that their mother has passed away. There’s a really heartbreaking scene early in the film where Augie and his father-in-law (Hanks) are on the phone. Augie can’t find the words to tell his children that their mother is dead, he says “the time is never right.” Hanks character, who isn’t a big fan of Augie, replies “the time is always wrong.” Moments before this scene there’s a nuclear bomb test that we see in the distance. This is the American desert of the 1950’s in a Wes Anderson picture after all. In the wake of the phone call we are left to ask ourselves what happens when you lose the person you love most and your life explodes into a million pieces?   

While waiting for the Stargazer’s convention to begin Augie meets the movie star Midge Campbell, played by Scarlett Johansson, who just chews up the scenery in this movie. Campbells daughter is also a Stargazer and the two families get placed in side-by-side cottages. Johansson’s character has never had a stable relationship with any of the men in her life; including her father, brother, uncles and two husbands. Over the course of the movie Augie and Midge talk to each other from their bathroom windows, and a sort of “my life is messed up, your life is messed up” romance ensues. At one point in the movie Midge tells Augie, “I think I see how I see us… Two catastrophically wounded people who don’t express the depths of their pain because – we don’t want to.” I can’t stress enough how great Johansson is in this. It’s probably my favorite thing she’s done since Lost in Translation. 

The heart of Asteroid City’s story is really about how people live with grief. It’s not a mopey pic at all, and I wouldn’t even call it overly sentimental. There’s very little mourning going on, but the film is concentrated on that feeling of almost complete shock that happens in the wake of trauma. There’s a lot of crazy shit that happens in this movie, but it all works because on a fundamental level we can all understand how surreal the world seems when we are grieving. When I’ve lost people close to me there are times when no matter how hectic my everyday life may be, in my head I’m watching it all from somewhere in outer space, hearing nothing but the rush of my own blood in my head.  It’s in those moments everything seems a little wild and out of place.

So often Wes Anderson films can get lost in their Rube Goldberg designs, but I feel like Asteroid City never lost the plot. The focus of the movie stayed on the characters, while the impeccable set design and pyrotechnics dazzled in the background. In a sequence late in the film our main character gets his moment of catharsis. He quite literally breaks the fourth wall and we’re taken on a journey in which Anderson pushes us all the way down the rabbit hole to deliver the emotional dagger. For a moment we fall through all of layers of pretense so can we get to the truth. In one scene you can almost imagine how Anderson’s entire career had led to this movie, this moment. It felt like the last jigsaw puzzle falling into place, revealing something beautiful.