By Steve Erickson

Asteroid City is hard to pin down, largely because it holds its ideas about nostalgia and grief at arm’s length.

Asteroid City, directed by Wes Anderson. Screening at Kendall Square Cinema, Coolidge Corner Theatre.

Scarlett Johansson in a scene from Asteroid City.

No director clings as tightly to the border between auteur and meme as Wes Anderson. Recent deepfakes of Star Wars, Succession, Lord of the Rings, and The Matrix that ape his visual approach may be cheap shots, but they show how tightly defined his style is. In a review of Asteroid City, critic Vadim Rizov described these pastiches as easy and appealing because “even a barely-film-literate coder can figure out its basic components,” as codified in this representative tweet: “neoclassical symmetry, pastel color palette, flat perspective, stagelike location, cinematic framing, hyperrealistic photo.” Anderson has made two animated films, The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs, and his manipulation of images in them doesn’t stray too far from how he handles actors. At best, this self-consciousness can carry some real emotional and intellectual weight: a drama where representations are playfully represented. But it’s also led to sloppiness, such as Orientalist depictions of South and East Asians. And his aesthetic seems to inevitably trivialize political struggle, rendering it cartoon-like. Unfortunately, these tendencies have dragged down his last two films, Isle of Dogs and The French Dispatch. The problem seems to be that Anderson is so drenched in an ideal of cool that he can easily lapse into 2000s clichés about hipsters — especially when his perspective roves further and further back in time.

Shot on 35mm, Asteroid City is presented as a ’50s TV show about a play, dramatized as a film. As the host, Bryan Cranston does his best Rod Serling impression. While the play is shown in black-and-white Academy ratio, the film-within-the-film opens up to color widescreen. Rather than going for a convenient prettiness, Anderson and cinematographer Robert Yeoman transform the desert town of Asteroid City into an uncanny valley. Tinted in orange and blue, the images are bright, as though they were shot in the sun without much protection. Although shot in real Spanish exteriors, Asteroid City looks like a set, or at least the outdoors were heavily modified in postproduction. Rizov likens the film’s look to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert, for which the director had the leaves of trees repainted to suit his vision. Anderson did not go that far, but real soil was covered in red dirt.

Although Asteroid City is a work of eccentric sci-fi, its storyline is grounded in grief. Augie Steenbach (Jason Schwartzmann) is struggling to recover from his wife’s sudden death and the challenge of having to parent his four children. He can’t bring himself to break the news to his teenage son Woodrow, who pushes Augie to visit Asteroid City so he can take part in a convention for teenage scientists. Unbeknownst to the kids, the gathering is a government scheme to steal their ideas, especially if they inspire the invention of effective weapons. Five-star General Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) looms over the nefarious project. An actress named Midge (Scarlett Johansson) covers her eyes in makeup to simulate bruises or poses for a fake suicide attempt, her bathtub surrounded by candy “pills.” Amidst all the human drama, an alien lands, laying claim to the asteroid that gives the town its name.

Anderson’s style embraces a handmade quality and it can be quite charming. Asteroid City never tries to make the alien look convincing — it’s obviously a plastic miniature. During the closing credits we see a bird dancing back and forth in the road. But the images all reflect the same unyielding demand for discipline: it comes from a desire to micro-manage every detail, and that yen for control can be suffocating for the viewer. Anderson may be having more fun than we do — I can imagine him spending happy afternoons sitting in a Parisian café leafing through books about fonts.

The weakest aspect of Asteroid City is its framing story. Adrien Brody plays an actor immersed in the Method. He’s supposed to invoke Marlon Brando, but he isn’t Brando. In fact, Asteroid City rolls out a truckload of Easter eggs, such as the fact that Augie is named after the flat-bed celluloid editing system. It’s also full of name actors in small roles: Willem Dafoe, Liev Schreiber, Steve Carell, Edward Norton, Hong Chau. Most have little to do; their presence testifies more to Anderson’s circle of friends than necessity.

Steve Carell in a scene from Asteroid City.

Initially off-putting, Asteroid City finds some emotional resonance by its last half hour. (It’s divided into three acts and an epilogue, highlighted with onscreen texts and further split into individual scenes.) Augie’s difficulty functioning as a father lies at the heart of the story, but it risks being buried in Anderson’s overly elaborate framing and color schemes. His style is so elaborate and distancing it fends off direct confrontation. It is a defensive stance that is mirrored in his characters’ behavior: Johansson’s actress endlessly rehearses trauma. Actors are directed to speak in flat, affectless tones.

So the film is hard to pin down, largely because it holds its ideas about nostalgia and grief at arm’s length. The intersections between theater and “life” make it hard to follow Augie’s struggle. The protagonist’s beard looks suspiciously fake in the desert scenes — he reveals that it is by taking it off as a theater actor. Cranston’s character pops up once in the color footage of Asteroid City. This interplay between theater and film does not add much to Asteroid City‘s drama. It just makes it more complicated, to a degree that may not be entirely intentional.

Ultimately, Asteroid City reads as strange in a manner that goes beyond Anderson’s trademark quirks. It is his most enigmatic film yet. The movie is preoccupied with the past, but aware that it can only envision the 1950s through a distorting prism of pop culture, as though its makers were wearing shades to look safely at an eclipse. It pounds away at the subject of grief long enough to arrive at something that feels real. But the artificiality of its surface is so dominant that reality seems to be beside the point.

Steve Erickson writes about film and music for Gay City News, Slant Magazine, the Nashville Scene, Trouser Press, and other outlets. He also produces electronic music under the tag callinamagician. His latest album, The Bloodshot Eye of Horus, was released in November 2022, and is available to stream here.