Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Director: Wes Anderson
Quick Impressions:
Once again, we’re behind on movies. I’ve been busy writing, going to the beach, and giving away all my worldly possessions. (It’s nothing sinister. I’ve just discovered that while I loathe the frustrating transience of housework, I’m a huge fan of getting rid of stuff permanently. Every time I drop off five or six bags, and St. Vincent de Paul takes them, I feel like I’ve pulled off a perfectly executed caper. It’s a huge rush. I’ve also come up with the brilliant scheme of rewrapping all my son’s unopened past presents and regifting them (to him) at this year’s birthday party! (I’m not even keeping it a secret. He’s excited, too! He gets such a thrill from unwrapping, but he almost never plays with toys. I don’t know if it’s a Gen Alpha thing, or if he’s just quirky.)
So I’m having fun pretending I bought a haunted house, intending to gut and flip it. And one of my writing projects is finally coming together in the way that I want. (Another reward of drastic decluttering is mental clarity. My mom’s been dead for three years. My dad pointed out that if she returned from the dead today, she would not demand, “Where are those coffee mugs? What about that Easter Bunny deviled egg plate?”) (One cabinet of dishes was so overcrowded that I gave away three boxes, and the cabinet was still full! I don’t know where she got all that stuff!) She died a long time ago. I have to make the house livable for the rest of us. (He expressed interest in a bunch of dishes. His wife was like, “Those are so lovely—we don’t want them.”) (She and I are like-minded in our zeal to divest.)
At any rate, when I was brainstorming the best word to describe how doing housework is just pointless (because it never stays done), I kept thinking of transience, ephemerality, impermanence—and I realized those were all the same words I was generating when I was talking to my husband about Asteroid City on the way home from the movie theater.
The Good:
This movie is surprisingly deep for something so pointedly shallow. There’s like a tongue-in-cheek pretense of depth that’s masking actual depth. As is always the case with Wes Anderson films, everything’s over-stylized and mock pretentious. And that’s all quite funny and charming. But it’s also concealing many moments of genuinely thought-provoking profundity.
I’ve always loved metadrama, and this film is replete with it. Asteroid City looks quite artificial (and made me desperately want to go to Disneyland) because it is. In the opening scenes (presented in black-and-white), we learn that what we’re about to watch is actually a play. So occasionally, we get black-and-white scenes that show us what’s going on behind the scenes with the writer, director, and cast of the play (that we’re currently watching as the main story in color). So there are all these fun narrative layers. We get Scarlett Johansson as an actress in the play, playing an actress, rehearsing scenes from another script that she tells someone at one point will probably mirror her real life (in the play). (I love stuff like that!)
There’s also this theme of transience and the ephemerality (and unclosable distance) of all encounters. Scarlett Johansson and Jason Schwartzman are always talking to each other through open windows (from different houses). They’re (perhaps) having a (perhaps) fleeting romance. His character is a widower. Hers is an actress. He’s always helping her rehearse. So most of the time they’re talking, they’re playing other characters. Then at one point, he walks out into the black-and-white behind-the-scenes reality, where he proceeds to walk outside onto a balcony and talk to Margot Robbie across an alley. She’s also standing on a balcony of the neighboring theatre. She’s in a different play, but (before her scene was cut) she briefly played Schwartzman’s character’s character’s late wife (who is now seen only in a photograph). And they run through a scene together (that he’s forgotten but she remembers). And in the character of the late wife from the play, she reveals to him (as they speak in a literally alien space) that perhaps he should find a new mother figure for their son. The structure of this is just fascinating. I could write essays about it for days.
Running through the whole film is this idea that encounters are by their very nature brief, mysterious, and to a degree uncontrollable. At the center of the story, we get an alien (played by Jeff Goldblum as is revealed in the opening credits). So there’s this UFO plot. Nobody really understands what the alien wants. But nobody really understands what anybody else wants either. And they’re also not sure what they themselves want, if pressed.
After the alien encounter, they all must be kept in quarantine. And not until the word “quarantine,” was used did I realize, “Ohhh!” In the future, film historians will have fun with this movie.
If you like Wes Anderson’s other films, you’ll like this one, too. (I feel like I always say that lately. I’m the worst movie reviewer. I put the onus of critique entirely on everyone else. “Well, you ought to know what you like!”) I think this happens because so many of the successful non-Marvel, non-franchise movies are made by borderline auteurs who have unmistakably styles of work.
But this is no departure by Wes Anderson. It’s very much what you would expect in terms of art direction and writing style. (It’s co-written by frequent collaborator Roman Coppola who has co-written some of my favorite Wes Anderson films.) Several actors who usually work with him show up, though, notably not Bill Murray. (I wondered if the Tom Hanks part could have been played by him, but apparently Steve Carrell replaced him when he was unable to participate because he had Covid.)
The cast is fantastic. I’m slightly amazed he managed to pack so many stars into the film, yet give them all pretty good material.
Scarlett Johansson gives my favorite performance of the film. A few times, she made me laugh out loud. (My husband and I found the film extremely funny, but no one else was laughing, which was a little unnerving.) Tilda Swinton is pretty great, too. She doesn’t have as big a part, but one of her lines just cracked me up.
Funniest Moment:
As we arrived in the auditorium, I was surprised to see the couple further down our row had brought an elementary school aged boy. I didn’t think he’d like the movie much. But when the alien unexpectedly arrived, he blurted out in shock, “D’oh my God!” It was hysterically funny. That scene is funny, anyway, because we know from the opening credits that the alien is played by Jeff Goldblum. Yet initially, he doesn’t speak. So it’s just very funny to watch his actions and think of Jeff Goldblum.
We also loved Jeffrey Wright’s first speech because it so perfectly replicates the way our son reads us his novels (which have chapters of about that length).
Also relatable is a young character played by Aristou Meehan who is always trying to get people to dare him to do inadvisable stunts (and doing them anyway, even if no one will dare him). He made remember my younger self at slumber parties.
Best Action Sequence:
There’s a scene where Maya Hawke is teaching a class of school children that goes off in a somewhat unexpected direction and then turns into a musical number. I was watching, thinking, “This is how my ‘educational’ moments with the kids always turn out.”
Then my husband leaned over and whispered, “I have a feeling this is what it’s like inside your brain.” I thought, “Good point! No wonder that’s how all lessons I plan for them turn out!” (Rupert Friend is pretty great in this, playing a cowboy named Montana.)
Best Scene:
I’m so partial to those conversations between Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson through the windows. But best I like the part where he wanders out of the play to have a conversation with the director, played by Adrien Brody. I kept thinking, “Actors are sacred vessels, and theatre is a form of worship, and a way to connect to truth,” and also, “This is just a metaphor for life.”
Best Scene Visually:
My husband’s favorite scene comes when everyone in a drama class starts chanting the same phrase. That is pretty gripping. I’m always a huge fan of the eerie power of communal chant. Of course, the whole movie is quite eye-pleasing.
The Negatives:
I like this movie. My husband said immediately it was the best film we’ve seen all year, though honestly I think we say that too often these days because we leave big gaps between movie-going experiences. It’s so long from one movie to the next, we tend to forget them all and get radically swayed by recency bias.
I do like Asteroid City a lot, though. It’s so funny, yet it kept making me ponder the nature of truth and the mystery inherent in engaging with the Other. Any other.
It’s pretty gripping. As we walked into the auditorium, I wondered, “Is the A/C not working in here?” It wasn’t. But I stopped noticing and forgot about it completely because I found the movie so enthralling. Afterwards, though, my husband noted that the woman sitting near us had been fanning herself a lot. He speculated that they left in the middle because it was uncomfortably hot.
I think they might have left because there’s full frontal nudity. It’s brief, and it’s tasteful. In fact, I like the way it’s done because Scarlett Johansson’s character is talking to someone out the window, but we see her naked in the mirror. (I also love mirrors.)
But it is unusual to see full frontal nudity in a film rated PG-13 (and maybe uncomfortable if you’ve brought a child). So if you’re planning to see this with a child, be aware that there’s very brief full frontal nudity.
I need to see Asteroid City a second time before attempting a serious critique. The things I liked, I liked so much that I was probably blinded to its flaws. It isn’t a terribly complicated story, but I think it has a lot to say about life, anyway, with sharp dialogue and good performance by a stacked cast. A number of the story lines aren’t thoroughly resolved, but I think that’s the point. Asteroid City is not a place you stay forever. These people are all like ships passing in the night. Jason Schwatzman’s character doesn’t get to know any of them too well. He just takes pictures of what catches his eye in the moment.
Overall:
I wouldn’t say Asteroid City is my favorite Wes Anderson film, but it has the virtue of being so slight (at 1 hour, 45 minutes) that it’s hard to find too much fault with it. Certainly the film is not pretending to be the world’s greatest cinematic epic. But it’s quite funny and pleasant to watch, and it has surprising heft that it almost hides under its eye-pleasing, stylized façade. I liked it quite a bit, and I’d guess it’s extremely rewatchable. I would watch it again right now. (The song in the closing credits is quite catchy, too!)