Asteroid City Blues

From its very first frame to its closing credits, I love the way Asteroid City looks. It reminds me of a live-action Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote scene, and only barely a live-action one at that. Its colors are so pure and its faces so composed that it seems to exist in a liminal state between the imagination and the real, and in that way, it implies that imagination is real, every bit as real as the world itself. These colors don’t exist in nature, at least not quite in this way, but their artificiality makes them no less beautiful. I love the orange sherbet sand. I love the teal that pops up everywhere. I love the blue of the sky. The palette is faded but still vibrant, like a 1955 Cadillac that shows its age but still stands out for the audacity of its design, especially when compared to its drab modern counterparts.

It reminds me of this tweet by film writer Devika Girvish, who recounted a conversation with filmmaker Helena Wittman, who in turn recounted a conversation she had with an audience member after screening her ocean-set film Drift. “There’s all this blue, she swims, that’s all very nice,” the viewer told her. “But where’s the message?” Wittman then told the story to one of her actors, who responded that he looks at film the opposite way: “I get the message. I get the story. But where’s the blue?”

I loved Asteroid City the second I saw its blue, and I think it’s okay to love a movie just because of how it looks. Film is a visual medium, and if you love watching a movie, it doesn’t really matter if it’s because of its ideas or its performances or its colors. It’s particularly justifiable, I’d argue, to love a Wes Anderson movie for how it looks because, more than any other filmmaker, his films are about how they look. 

It is beyond common knowledge by this point that Anderson’s films are instantly recognizable. His critics use his consistency against him and claim he favors “style over substance.” AI jokesters like to ape his compositions, completely misunderstanding what makes him great. And those viewers who have not yet fully grasped the meaning of his work often complain that he makes the same movie over and over again, to which I say, “No,” and also, “Good.” Artists like Anderson, Yasujirō Ozu, Paul Schrader, and Brian De Palma, who till the same earth in nearly every film, are the ones who have taught me the most about art. We all have our fascinations and obsessions. Some filmmakers, like Spielberg, sneak them into big, commercial projects, and it takes decades for us to fully suss them out. Others make no apologies for their obsessions. They devise their own myth, and then keep playing with it, probing it for meaning, reinventing it every few years to discern what it tells us about our changing world and their changing selves.

Over his last few films, Anderson has begun probing himself. Perhaps in response to his critics, or maybe just his maturation as an artist and a person, he has begun exploring and ultimately justifying his own fascinations. Anderson has long been known as a meticulous director who cares deeply about the colors, the production design, and the costumes of his films. The “stuff,” you might say. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, he justified his love of “stuff.” Its plot, in which a European concierge with impeccable taste becomes the target of fascists and a family of wealthy opportunists, subtly frames art, style, and pleasure as acts of defiance against the forces of evil. You could argue that all his films are about this very topic, but Grand Budapest made it explicit.

After a brief foray into animation with the delightful Isle of Dogs, Anderson’s returned to live-action in last year’s The French Dispatch, a quasi-collection of short films fashioned as stories in a New Yorker-like magazine. At first glance, these stories are seemingly unrelated, but look closely at The French Dispatch, and you see the same subject as in Grand Budapest: Art and culture as weapons in the never-ending fight against human greed and political oppression. There’s a jailed painter who angers his coarse benefactor by painting a fresco on the prison walls so they can’t be sold, a student revolutionary whose love affair with an older journalist gives way to passion for a spirited rival, and finally a critic who combines his passion for food and social justice into a tale that upholds them both as equally worthy of our attention. It’s this last segment—in particular, a speech given by the critic, played with nobility by Jeffrey Wright—that drives the point home. 

With Asteroid City, Anderson is once again explaining himself, but instead of pitching culture as a weapon against fascism, it pitches creativity as a defense against the void. Like many of his films, it concerns death. Jason Schwartzman plays Augie, a recent widower and father of four who has not yet told his children of their mother’s death, which occurred three weeks prior to the film’s events. Scarlett Johansson is Midge Campbell, a divorced actress reeling from an abusive relationship or two. They have come to Asteroid City for their children to participate in the Junior Stargazing Convention, where children are honored by the U.S. government for their contributions to human’s understanding of the cosmos. 

It’s an idea as old as cinema, or at least 1902, when George Méliès took us on A Trip to the Moon. We have all looked up at the stars and wondered about our place in the universe, and many great filmmakers, like Kubrick, Spielberg, Denis and Nolan, have proffered an answer. It is Anderson’s masterstroke, however, to collide space exploration and artistic exploration like so many atoms. The explosion is illuminating. In some moments, the planets align perfectly, like when Augie and Midge run lines for her newest film through the bathroom windows of their adjacent cabins. Neither can muster the words for their grief, but the words of a far-off screenwriter somehow helps them access their oceans of grief and their burgeoning feelings for each other. Schwartzman and Johansson forge a remarkable chemistry, each of them settling into the stillness of their characters without ever sacrificing emotional nuance.

Elsewhere, perfection eludes Asteroid City, but this may be by design. There are wonderful ellipses, moments—stretches, even—where the meaning recedes, and we’re left wandering in the dark. I think of a scene towards the end when the playwright (Edward Norton) sits in front of his class of acting students, all of whom end up “starring” in the film Asteroid City (as well as the film Asteroid City), urging them to enter a sleep state in the hopes that it will help him figure out how to end the story. They all immediately begin playing asleep, then wake up one by one and shout, “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” like soldiers in a dream army or members of a Godardian cult. It’s evocative and memorable and (I’d argue) purposefully vague. It has something to do with an embrace of the unknown, but the closer you get to grasping the moment’s meaning, the more it slips away from you. For a director known for seeking ultimate control of the frame, it feels like a major maturation.

And even if we can’t figure out how it all fits together—as one character says, “Everything’s connected, and nothing works”—we still have the blue. Under normal circumstances, I might feel silly filing a review that amounts to me saying, “It was pretty to look at,” but such a statement would be perfectly in keeping with the ideas of Asteroid City, the entire Wes Anderson oeuvre, and this moment in my own life. Much like the residents of Asteroid City, I have not had the easiest year. My beloved dog Zooey died rather suddenly in February. My family and I are still struggling to climb out of it. At times, I have struggled to even feel it. Like Augie, I had a hard time figuring out how to tell the rest of the family (all dogs).  I’ve spent more than a few nights looking at the stars and trying to figure out what to do next, and how to continue being a parent and a husband and a citizen of the universe while my grief gnaws at me. So forgive me, reader, but I’m going to try to be okay with simply leaning into the blue, loving how Asteroid City looks, feeling what it feels, and wondering about the rest.