The film opens in a television studio. Our host is Bryan Cranston, telling the story of the making of the long-running play Asteroid City. On the television studio stage is Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), the playwright, plugging away at his typewriter. Then begins the play within the movie—about a small desert town that is hosting an awards ceremony for young scientists, only for it to be interrupted by a flying saucer. The film is told in acts, and often switches between the movie (the play), the making of the play (with actors discussing their roles and such), and Cranston hosting the televised making-of show. As a bit, sometimes the characters are even confused about which segment they’re in.
Schwartzman plays war photographer and recent widower Augie Steenbeck, whose son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) has devised a method to project images on the moon, which could have applications in interstellar advertising. Scarlett Johansson is Marilyn Monroe surrogate Midge Campbell, whose daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards) is among the young scientists and mirrors her mother in falling for a Steenbeck. There are too many stars to mention, of whom some shine (Jeffrey Wright, Maya Hawk) while others get lost in the light pollution (Steve Carell, Liev Schreiber). It’s not their fault, it’s just overkill. There are too many recognizable actors and too few consequential roles.
Asteroid City is at its best when Anderson is conducting his brand of frenetic yet controlled chaos, and when he is doing the exact opposite. The scenes between Schwartzman and Johansson, two lost souls finding brief solace in each other through the bathroom windows of their motel huts, and the scenes between the brilliant teenage scientists, finding comradery in shared qualities that make them all outcasts elsewhere, are Anderson at his deadpan best. It’s an easily imitable style that no one else has perfected.
And still, it’s not for everybody. I’ve often claimed one of Anderson’s earliest films, Rushmore, to be my all-time favorite movie. In that film, high schooler Max Fisher (also Schwartzman) puts on extravagant plays: Serpico, Heaven and Hell, and a little one-act about Watergate. It’s as if Anderson is making Max Fisher’s plays the entire movie now. Even if there are poignant themes of grief and nihilism, art and artifice (and there are), it’s all couched so deeply in sets that look like sets of sets that it will inevitably turn some people off. And that’s just fine.
