105 min | PG-13 | June 16, 2023 | Focus Features
A grieving father drives his kids into a desert town for a junior stargazer convention. An alien shows up and the government quarantines everyone. Then Wes Anderson reminds you it is all a play, just in case you felt something.
Asteroid City is a town of a dozen people, a crater, a vending machine, and a highway to nowhere. Augie Steenbeck arrives with his four children and a dead wife he has not told them about. A Junior Stargazer convention brings scientists, soldiers, and an alien who descends to steal the local meteorite. The film wraps all of this inside a black-and-white television broadcast about the making of the play we are watching. The real subject is grief and the impossibility of processing it, and the nested structure exists to keep that grief at arm’s length.
Jason Schwartzman plays Augie as a war photographer who points his camera at everything because he cannot look directly at his own loss. He burns his hand on a Quick Griddle and barely registers it. Scarlett Johansson plays Midge Campbell, a movie star rehearsing lines through a window across the courtyard, performing intimacy because she has forgotten the other kind. Tom Hanks plays Stanley Zak, the gruff father-in-law who shows up to help and stays to argue. Bryan Cranston, as the television Host, keeps stepping into frame to remind you that none of these people are real.
Wes Anderson directs from his own screenplay, built on a story he developed with Roman Coppola. Robert Yeoman shoots the desert in sun-bleached pastels, all turquoise and terracotta under a flat white sky, with whip-pans that snap between characters like a stage manager redirecting your eye. The matte-painting mesas and the cartoon mushroom cloud on the horizon announce their own artifice. Anderson cuts to the boxy Academy-ratio black-and-white of the backstage scenes to puncture every emotional beat before it can land. The control is total, and that is the problem and the point at once.
The film keeps telling you that you cannot wake up if you do not fall asleep. It is a line repeated until it becomes a thesis about surrendering to feeling. Asteroid City builds an entire apparatus to deliver that idea and then refuses to fall asleep itself. The result is a beautiful object that holds its own heart behind glass, and never quite decides whether the glass is the subject or the obstacle.