The play’s the thing, and for Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), a Tennessee Williams-type with a predilection for Tom of Finland cowboy art, his new play is sure to be the one that wakes the audience up. Or puts them to sleep. Maybe both.
It’s called Asteroid City, and it’s set in a small town of the same name on the border between California, Arizona and New Mexico. Small is being generous: 80-some people call Asteroid City home, and they either work at the boxcar diner, the resort cabins or the asteroid crater’s scenic overlook. Off in the distance, the U.S. Army continues to test atomic bombs, but the town folk don’t seem to mind. Nor do they mind the long-forgotten, never-finished overpass ramp and the endless chase between cops and robbers down Asteroid City’s main drag.
All of this is presented in precise framing and camera pans, fastidious production design, controlled color palettes and robotic performances from nearly two dozen named characters that move through the sets as if trapped in a diorama. That’s probably the point.
And I probably don’t have to tell you that Asteroid City is the new film from director Wes Anderson. Teaming again with co-writer Roman Coppola, it’s an unusual movie, even in Anderson’s oeuvre. To call this film “fussy” seems like a no-brainer, but Asteroid City feels more hermetically sealed than his previous work. Darker too. For reasons I won’t get into, because it would either spoil the plot or sound too complicated to untangle, this is all by design — which also sounds like an obvious observation. So it goes.
The city of Asteroid Citylooks like a movie set. Not that it looks like it was shot on one, but that it is a candy-coated fabricated set existing somewhere between those mid-century case study houses and Radiator Springs. It’s a fantasy from a time when the present still fantasized about itself.
The players are many. Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) is a recent widower who doesn’t know how to tell his children their mother died. Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) is an actress known for her moody sexuality but wants to be a comedian. General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) has come to present awards to the junior stargazers for their achievements in technological innovation — inventions include a jetpack, a laser gun and a way to project images of the Moon for intergalactic advertisement. Steve Carell plays the motel manager, Matt Dillon plays Asteroid City’s one and only mechanic and Rupert Friend wanders around as a good-natured cowboy in denim buttoned up to here.
Asteroid City is a trying movie at times; magical at others. The speech General Gibson gives about his story up until now is one of the most electric and captivating pieces of writing and performance in theaters these days. Then there’s Bryan Cranston as The Host. Cut from the Rod Sterling cloth, he introduces viewers of Asteroid City the movie to Asteroid City the setting and Asteroid City the play. Anderson and Coppola take this conceit further, adding title cards for act and scene numbers, choosing artifice over naturalism any chance they can. The one exception is the presence of Stanley (Tom Hanks), who has a habit of stepping on other actors’ lines following pregnant pauses. It’s a nice bit that introduces some awkward realism, as if Anderson is saying, “Try as you might; you can’t control everything.”
That’s what Asteroid City is about — control. Conrad is trying to control the actors in his play, the actors in his play are trying to control the situation, and Anderson is trying to control both (and our reactions too). Maybe that’s why it feels so airless, even when one character makes a Pirandello-esque break in search of meaning. Asteroid City has gumption, I’ll give it that, but it also lacks the heart to land it.
ON SCREEN: Asteroid City opens in theaters on June 23.
