Asteroid City

 Wes Anderson's feature film, Asteroid City (2023) seems improvised, a curious impression since the movie is stylistically disciplined to the point of obsession.  It's hard to reconcile the movie's haphazard and inconsequential plot with the picture's austerely abstract mise-en-scene.  Ultimately, the effect is one of incompleteness and confusion -- Anderson (with co-writer Roman Coppola) throws just about everything at the wall in the hope that something will stick.  Further, the film's rambling and episodic plot seems to be primarily a vehicle for delivering a series of A-list cameo appearances -- the movie has small roles for Matt Dillon, Tom Hanks, Tilda Swinton, Steve Carell, and Willem Defoe among others.  These performances aren't fully realized and the roles seem to be underwritten.  If there is a central plot in the film's narrative chaos, it is a severely stylized and determinedly undramatic romance, more suggested than shown, between Jason Schwartzman's character, a Hemingway-esque combat photographer, and an astringent, remote movie star played Scarlet Johannsen.  But this love affair involves physical detachment between the participants -- the war photographer and the movie star basically interact between the open windows of two adjacent tourist cabins in a motor court and it's rare that the lovers share the same frame.  (Anderson's camera shows the two characters in alternate shots that rotate around the red light bulb in the improvised darkroom in the photojournalist's cottage -- the changing position of the red highlight in the frame is an effect pioneered by Ozu in some of his films, that is, a focal point, often a flower or a colored ceramic, that orients the viewer between opposing flat frontal shots.)  Ultimately, Asteroid City is somewhat tedious although Anderson's formal invention never flags -- you wish that the material were better and more compelling.

Asteroid City's premise is a well-established theatrical and film conceit -- an eccentric group of travelers are thrown together in an isolated place and the movie documents, as it were, the chemical reactions that occur when these disparate elements are forced to interact; this plot drives film's as disparate as The Old Dark House (James Whale 1932), Key Largo (and, for that matter, Casablanca, and Wim Wenders' great The State of Things (1982); in these films, characters are trapped somewhere, waiting around for something to happen.  By it's nature, these plots are static, mostly about the passing of time in tense circumstances.  (Anderson's Darjeeling Limited, with characters stalled-out on a train traveling across India, has a similar structure.)  Everything in Asteroid City is weirdly overdetermined; plot points are underwritten always by at least two causes or motivations.  For instance, Schwartzman's melancholy war correspondent -- he looks like Clark Gable -- is stranded in Asteroid City, a remote town in the desert on the California-Nevada border for two reasons:   his car has broken down (we see it first towed into the frame) but, also, because his son, a scientific prodigy, has been invited to the place so he can be awarded a prize of some kind for an invention -- his device can project images from Earth onto the face of the moon.  ("What's it's application?" someone asks.  "Probably advertising," the boy genius says.)  But the child scientists are also assembled in the town to observe kind of weird, improbable stellar conjunction involving three lights in the sky aligning, something that you have to watch through a camera obscura or the celestial dots will be burned into your retina.  The broken-down car, which seems to strand the war photographer's family in the town turns out to be just a plot device to bring Tom Hanks into the picture -- Hanks plays the photographer's father-in-law.  The journalist has not yet told his children(he has three young daughters and the teenage prodigy son) that their mother has died; he is transporting her ashes in Tupperware.  (The film is set in the late fifties.)  Everyone waits around town for an award's ceremony, scheduled to take place in an impact crater made by a meteorite thousands of years before.  During this ceremony, conducted by a bellicose military man, an alien space craft appears and a cute, lanky creature from outer space appears, riding down a pole as if in fire station, to snatch the perfect round fragment of the meteorite on display in the crater.  The alien and his space craft depart and the government imposes a quarantine on the town in the vain attempt to keep people from knowing about the visitor from outer space.  (These efforts fail -- soon enough, there's a carnival on the outskirts of town a bit like the fair around the trapped pot-hunter in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole.)  Confined in the town are a group of country-western musicians (they play Texas swing music), a Sunday School teacher and her group of fifteen or so students, and a Hollywood movie star with her somewhat sullen and pouting daughter; several other boy and girl science geniuses round out the cast.  The movie star's daughter is interested in the war correspondent's genius son; an understated romance develops between the war photographer and the movie star to the dismay, but ultimate acceptance, of the character played by Tom Hanks, a sort of mild Trump figure, some kind of mogul who plays golf and dresses like Colonel Sanders.  None of this goes anywhere.  The little girls bury their mother's ashes in the desert.  The space alien appears again to return the pilfered meteorite.  The quarantine is lifted and the character's disperse without anything really being resolved or even explained.  

The action is  staged on a set that looks like the stylized Utah mesa and canyon country in the background of road runner cartoons (in fact, there is an animated road runner who makes cameo appearances) or like the red rock formations in the old Krazy Kat cartoons.  Because the plot is complex, Anderson's penchant for wholly symmetrical compositions is a somewhat limited; he has to use a more flexible mise-en-scene.  The editing often violates the 180 degree rule, resulting in discordant, showy editing.  The dialogue is very clever and dead-pan; it parodies fifties' tough-guy diction, but, ultimately, the ingenious patter becomes dull.  All emotions are repressed.  No one gets to act in a showy or histrionic manner -- everything is reticent, more a matter of subtle suggestion than dramatization.  For some reason that relates to the movies' weirdly overdetermined structure, the film has a frame narrative involving a playwright who seems to be a bit like Rod Serling writing the theater-piece that has been adapted for film as Asteroid City -- there are episodes showing the casting of the movie that we are watching and scenes within the movie (for instance, a detached love scene between Schwartzman and Scarlet Johannsen)in which the characters simply recite from the script of the play as if rehearsing.  The frame sequences are shot in TV-style black and white and narrated by Bryan Cranston who stand front-and-center declaiming into the camera in the manner of Rod Serling in the Twilight Zone.  An odd subplot in the frame to the action involves characters sleeping and seeming to dream -- are these characters really sleeping or merely acting?  There is a mantra about having to sleep to dream that is repeated several times.  I have no idea what the frame story about the creation of the Asteroid City theater piece is supposed to  mean; nothing in the frame seems thematically related to the action in the plot dramatized by the movie -- the outer narrative doesn't comment on the plot of the movie taking place in Asteroid City and the whole premise, a bizarre estrangement effect, doesn't make sense; Asteroid City is a theater piece set on an austerely furnished stage; but we aren't watching theater but a movie replete with cinematic devices and the frame evinces to me, at least, some serious lack of confidence in whether the complicated but trivial plot of the movie is sufficient to sustain it's length.  The picture is well-acted and the people talk as if they were characters in a J. D. Salinger short story; it's all precocious, precious, and whimsical but short on meaning.  The motif of child geniuses is characteristic of Anderson's movies beginning with Rushmore and continuing through many pictures including The Royal Tenenbaums and Moonlight Bay.  In my view, this movie isn't fully coherent and seems overly contrived; it's one of Anderson's lesser efforts although he's an interesting director with a distinctive approach to cinema and, even, his minor works are worth seeing.