From the archive: Asteroid City, June 2023

When Wes Anderson followed the triumph of The Royal Tenenbaums with 2004’s bloated The Life Aquatic and 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited, you could be forgiven for thinking he was spent. He’d become a collection of tropes, perfected to precision and ripe for parody; when unfunny people on social media talk about “Wes Anderson” this is what they reference.

2012’s Moonrise Kingdom kicked off Wes Anderson’s second act. The Grand Budapest Hotel, which landed in 2014, confirmed his new era: impeccably designed sets, obsessively composed frames, and painstakingly emotional beats tuned to a degree you could miss how much swims underneath the surface. Old Anderson jokes are Bill Murray making a silly face after reading Margot Tenenbaum’s life history and saying “she’s a smoker.” New Anderson jokes are Jason Schwartzman telling his father-in-law Tom Hanks “I haven’t found a good time to tell the kids their mother is dead” and Hanks responding “there’s never a good time” with a pregnant pause implying a laugh-track bellowing after his delivery.

Since Moonrise Anderson has wrapped his movies in conceptual nesting dolls. Moonrise is musical variations on themes; Budapest tells its story within a story, an homage to a writer’s decaying memory; The French Dispatch is the New Yorker told through an obituary. Asteroid City’s framing device is purposefully convoluted: Bryan Cranston hosts a mid-‘50s tv special about a playwright who wrote a never-produced play, Asteroid City, that also doubled as an SNL-ian bottle of pre-discovery young talent. It weaves “is this happening” moments with riveting, meta-performances from Edward Norton as a queer playwright and Jason Schwartzman as his lover, to Adrien Brody as a hothead director.

The play-within-a-tv special-within-a-film framing is a distraction: whereas previous framing devices suggested ways of interpretation, Anderson doesn’t offer that here. Instead it immerses you in the performances of his actors—if we subscribe to the idea of Asteroid City as his “COVID film,” the acting troupe and quarantine are two versions of a COVID bubble, and he’s asking us to view his movie as one of difficult conversations and grief bargaining, which is how I remember 2020. Casting a major star like Steve Carrell only to stash him as a minor bit character suggests Anderson like a lot of us spent the pandemic re-watching The Office. Richard Brody hit the mark with his review: he called Asteroid City “political” and I think that’s right. Quarantine dropped for no reason other than to appease restless rubes? How this doesn’t make them happier, but leads to a full-scale insurrection?

This way of making Asteroid City about performance signals his authorship of the movie, like an inscription. The first time I saw The French Dispatch I thought “this is someone born to make movies fulfilling his vocation.” The first time I saw Asteroid City I thought “is Wes Anderson the most important artist of the 21st century?” As a director he defies typical auteur traits, neither a blowhard or media personality; while his movies are always anticipated, they sidestep the insufferable masturbation that surrounds say new PTA films; he doesn’t take forever to make movies; and for all the hand-wringing about how fussy or twee or pretentious his movies are, since Moonrise they have all been modest hits that resonate outside the typical arthouse demographic, each with a fanbase devoted to their pick. (The DMs I got when I saw Budapest at a drive-in and posted it to my stories in 2020—some of those people never spoke to me before, or have since.)

The French Dispatch was about stories and Asteroid City is about the people inside of them, how they exist at the whim of their authors, how their lives are perpetually suspended and animate only when viewed or read. It’s mind-blowing a movie in 2023 is anchored by a Jason Schwartzman performance (Bored to Death rewatch when) and backseats Tom Hanks and Scarlett Johansson. And you can see this movie in a theater, and it makes money. Who else has the clout?

If movies are the populist artform of the past 100 years (the film industry is designed so we see every movie, and this is the only medium for which that is true), and Anderson is as influential as he is even in the streaming era, and all his movies become populist entertainment, wouldn’t that make him one of the most important artists/entertainers/thinkers we have?

The syllabus of movies, tv shows, music, books, fashion, design, and history encompassing everything since Bottle Rocket would teach you a lot of what you need to know about the 20th century. We don’t typically think of filmmakers, even artsy kinds, as influencers. But in the classic (cliché/stereotype) way we define authors as influencers—Capote, Wolfe, Zadie—Anderson fits this mold more than any other working American director, save for maybe his mentor Scorsese. That’s what makes his movies so good: informed by real-world taste, he works with actors like a novelist works with words, indifferent to audience demands, in pursuit of a singular vision.

If this seems like a lot of writing around Asteroid City than about it, that’s by design. I’ve only seen it once, and much of it resists surface-level analysis and passive enjoyment. It’s probably a four-star movie where his others are solidly five (other fours: Aquatic, Darjeeling, Isle [which might be a 3]). The anguish of Norton’s doomed romance, Schwartzman’s widower grief, Johansson’s trauma-influenced stoicism, quarantine, aliens, insurrections, fumbling government authorities, cowboys, real estate salesmen, atomic bombs—none of this is light or handled lightly. It doesn’t offer a ton of laughs but the pre-teen romance between Jake Ryan and Grace Edwards knocked me off my feet. The alien scenes are bizarre and funny and scary and unlike anything he’s done before.

Asteroid City is Anderson’s Tha Carter III—he already proved himself the greatest, re-wrote the rules, cultivated the following, the respect, he’s on autopilot yet not exactly phoning it in. But entering a late period at age 54 changes expectations and impact, and while it didn’t go platinum in a week, it was (yet again) a modest hit that will undoubtedly suffer from the braindead choice at Focus/NBC to put the movie on streaming something like three weeks after it opens. Executives hate movies, and they hate you, and they hate work, which is why the continued success of Wes Anderson is so life-affirming. He can do it and I hope he does it and will continue to do it until he runs out of ideas. As long as he doesn’t make Rebirth.