I don’t pay much attention to the Doomsday Clock—that pseudoscientific assessment of how close humanity is to destroying ourselves—but I can confidently guess that, in 2023, its pronouncement is dire. (OK, just checked, and it is.) A pandemic, an American insurrection, Russian aggression, and increasing environmental degradation all add up to some pretty dicey times. Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City takes place in a fictional American desert town decades ago, but it’s notable that the year in question—1955—was also one of extreme existential angst. Indeed, a recurring sight gag is the test explosion of an atom bomb.
Anderson’s vast ensemble arrives in the title town to attend the annual Junior Stargazer convention, hosted by the government agency that’s performing the nuclear testing. All gather under blistering blue skies, in the midst of endlessly stretching vistas that are punctuated by delightfully fake pink mesas (the production design, as you’d expect, is impeccable, like a Looney Tunes Road Runner short come to “life”). Here we meet: Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a photographer and father of three little girls, as well as a “brainiac” teen son (Jake Ryan) who is attending the convention; Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a screen star surreptitiously accompanying her own teen genius (Grace Edwards); and other various relatives, townspeople, and government officials played by the likes of Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Steve Park, Steve Carell, Maya Hawke, and Matt Dillon.
Such a cast—perhaps Anderson’s biggest, considering there are others I haven’t yet mentioned—would suggest a party. Yet Asteroid City might be Anderson’s bleakest film, bordering, at times, on nihilistic. His comedies have always had a mordant edge—both The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited directly address suicide and grief—yet they usually employ despair as a starting point, from which the characters move toward healing of some kind. In contrast, Asteroid City—like the rumbling reverberations of those atomic explosions—quivers with disquietude throughout.
The early appearance of grief is our first hint of the darkness (despite that blaring desert sun) to come. Shortly after Augie and his brood arrive in town, we learn that his wife has died—though he has yet to tell the children. (When he tries to explain to his father-in-law, played by Hanks, that the timing has never seemed right, Hanks perfectly delivers one of the film’s many succinctly sage lines: “The time . . . is always wrong.”) From there, we begin to notice how many of the jokes play on underlying unease, a feeling of helplessness that is at once societal and deeply personal. There are the atomic tests, of course, but also the partly constructed highway ramp that goes to nowhere, the fact that certain characters randomly carry guns (Hanks’ father-in-law; Steve Carell’s motel manager), and the recurring police chase of a hot rod, gunshots ringing back and forth, which screams without warning through the middle of town. Johansson’s Midge gives this unsettledness an intimate expression, as she rehearses, with Augie’s help, a suicide scene from her upcoming movie with such wounded exhaustion that you actually fear for Midge’s life.
This is probably as good a place as any to laud the depth of Johansson’s performance, especially considering it is essentially a supporting part. She delivers a minimalist turn—Midge doesn’t betray much—but a haunting one. In most of her scenes, whether looking at another character or the camera, Johansson adopts a vacant stare that somehow also penetrates your soul. Schwartzman matches her in what is essentially a double role. I haven’t yet mentioned that Asteroid City has a framing device; the story proper is actually a dramatization of a play, something we learn via a behind-the-scenes documentary that’s shot in black and white (and features Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, and others). And so Schwartzman plays both the clenched Augie—another minimalist turn, unlike anything else he’s done before—and the insecure actor playing Augie, who is struggling to understand the meaning of the play.
As Augie and Midge circle each other, both adrift in their respective spiritual malaise, an epiphany—literally from above—arrives. (Spoilers ahead.) At one of the convention’s outdoor ceremonies—where the teens are honored for inventing ray guns, jet packs, and the like—an alien spaceship hovers over the crowd, casting an eerie green glow on the proceedings. A strange being is lowered into their midst (the unassuming stop-motion design of the creature made me giddy), where it plucks the meteorite for which Asteroid City got its name from its display and promptly leaves. Everyone is left speechless, then immediately sent by government handlers into quarantine.
It’s amusing how little this actually changes things, at least on the surface. Unlike Close Encounters of the Third Kind’s Roy Neary, who becomes so obsessed by his own alien experience that he begins sculpting visions in mashed potatoes, the quarantined characters in Asteroid City mostly go about their usual business, waiting for the OK to leave. But underneath, in each, something has subtly changed, so that by its final moments the movie has backed away from its despair just a bit. You can feel it in the inventiveness of those kids. (Perhaps the next generation will do better?) You can feel it in the moment when the alien comes back, returning the meteorite with a strange inscription on it. (Perhaps a formula to get us out of our environmental mess?) More personally, you can feel it in the note Midge leaves behind for Augie, sharing the address of her P.O. box.
Or maybe you can feel it when Augie confesses to his children that, in his distress, he had thought about abandoning them with their grandfather. “I forgive you for considering it,” his son instantly responds. Exchanges like that offer us something like faith and hope—even if we know that, any moment now, another frantic police chase will come racing by.
(6/15/2023)
