Asteroid City (Wes Anderson)

For more than a decade, Anderson’s overly precious—twee—films achieved ever-more-elaborate mise-en-abyme structures (stories-within-stories). During this time, the technique served to obscure feeling following the near-universal rejection of his best film 2008’s Darjeeling Limited. Always longing to be loved—Anderson’s great theme—he reached a nadir in his use of layered artifice with the sublimation of the historical atrocity in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). It’s his most highly acclaimed film. Now, Anderson’s most divisive work, Asteroid City, addresses the needs of those suffering the ongoing covidpocalypse atrocity. The play-within-a-theatrical workshop-within-a-tv series structure of Asteroid City achieves the Pirandello-esque toward which Anderson strove since Darjeeling.

The eponymous play is set during a government quarantine of a small town visited by an alien in a UFO in the middle of the 20th Century. The claymation-style VFX recall the sublime encounter with a jaguar shark in Anderson’s 2004 The Life Aquatic that unites a community. Here, the community splinters through idiosyncratically expressed responses to their enforced containment. The great Robert Yeoman films the cast in the lattice-like shadows of a canopy under the desert sun—giving each character tangible, pop-up individuality. 

An actor (Jason Schwartzman) plays a photographer with the mantra: “My pictures always come out.” A recent widower, he struggles to mourn the loss of his wife and to move on by pursuing a movie starlet played by Scarlett Johansson. They dead-pan flirt across bungalow windows in a socially distanced fashion. The actor played by Schwartzman also struggles to find the character of the widower within himself (“I still don’t understand the play”).

During a smoke break, he meets the actress originally cast as his dead wife in a role cut from the final play. As the actress, Margot Robbie shows up—deus ex machina—to tie Anderson’s narratives together. In a sublime monologue, she plays (at least) 6 different characters (the stage directions, the dead wife, Schwartzmann’s character’s character, her social self, her true self, and the perceptual reality of Margot Robbie). During the monologue, she connects the play’s close encounter with the space man to the shyness of her motherless son: “the secrets of the universe.” Robbie’s appearance in Elizabethan garb, filmed in Yeoman’s black-and-white and in the lateral and straight-ahead compositions, awakens Schwartzman’s actor to his character’s sense of faith. It validates the integrity of an individual’s and artist’s vision to penetrate the ineffable and imperishable in the encounter with the Other.

As with Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, Anderson’s Asteroid City aims towards a more perfect expression of and amelioration of genuine pain — call it: muse-en-abyme.

After 15 years, Anderson’s own picture finally comes out.