Movie Review: Asteroid City 

• Focus Features

Every time a new Wes Anderson movie emerges, it feels like we have to re-litigate the same arguments about his work: that it's too precious and sterile, that it's all about quirky and mannered performances, that it lacks heart and soul. I'll simplify my own response to these complaints with a single word—"bollocks"—before turning to the possibility that Asteroid City is, at least in small part, Anderson's own response to them.

That's not to say that it's a defensive, "I am so sincere and heartfelt" act of meta-filmmaking, but more that it doubles down what his films have almost always been about. He tells stories about people who have set up regimented, carefully-composed lives for themselves, dealing with the introduction of chaotic change to their lives: the celebrated oceanographer facing the possible end of his career in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou; the family and community members reacting to impetuous young love in Moonrise Kingdom; the meticulous concierge facing encroaching fascism in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Asteroid City throws several paradigm shifts of post-World War II America—the atomic age, Method acting, television—into a blender, and emerges with typically hilarious and poignant study of how hard it is to pivot to a new reality.

He does so with a nesting-doll structure for the artifice of his narrative. A television host (Bryan Cranston) introduces us to the idea that "Asteroid City" is, in fact, a play created by writer Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) in 1955. We see plenty of the play itself, which focuses on an American desert town where folks are gathering for an annual competition of young teen inventors, among them recently-widowed war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) and his son Woodrow (Jake Ryan), and popular movie actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and her daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards). But we also get behind-the-scenes glimpses of that play's creation, from Earp meeting and casting the actor playing Augie, to the personal difficulties facing the play's director, Schubert Green (Adrien Brody).

Most of the comedy in Asteroid City centers on the scenes from the play, specifically in the aftermath of an actual alien visitation. Maya Hawke does lovely, flustered work as an elementary schoolteacher trying to keep her quarantined class of students on task when all they want to do is talk about the alien (and maybe even write a song about it); Augie and Midge begin to form a connection across the space between their respective motor-park bungalows. Anderson wrestles oddball moments out of the setting, the situations and the characters, providing regular bursts of deadpan humor.

And, as he always does, Anderson folds that humor into something deeper and richer. Within the world of "Asteroid City," he's poking at the kind of post-war optimism that gave rise to the student science contest, but wasn't quite ready for how certain developments were going to change their world—symbolically in the person of the alien visitor, but also in the mushroom clouds from nearby nuclear testing and in the not-particularly-responsible real-estate development of the arid desert southwest. Even Augie's inability to tell his children about the death of his wife and Midge's professional insecurities feed into this notion of people who don't know quite what to do when the ground beneath them feels unstable.

Asteroid City's Rosetta Stone might be a late scene when Schwartzman's actor-playing-Augie, Jones Hall, flees the play's theater during a moment of artistic crisis, and encounters the actress (Margot Robbie) who was supposed to play Augie's wife in scenes that were ultimately cut from "Asteroid City." He has a little slip of the tongue, however, and refers to her as "the wife who played my actress," turning their subsequent scene—in which the actress replays the dialogue that would have deepened the relationship between the two characters—into one where the veneer between artist and art gets even thinner. The behind-the-scenes scenes in Asteroid City remind us of the real people and real emotions behind the movies, plays and television that we enjoy, and that they're not simply dioramas constructed to please the eye. Anderson keeps reminding us that the things we want to be neat and tidy are always messy, and that life—and the art that wants to show us something about that life—is all about figuring out how to make peace with that mess.