‘Asteroid City’: A melancholic search for meaning — and an absolute flex from Wes Anderson

Jason Schwartzman and Tom Hanks in Asteroid City

By Jake Skubish

Gathered together in a crater formed by a meteorite that made impact three millennia ago, the young scientists of Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City listen as the military leader honoring their achievements, General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright), delivers a foreboding speech.

“If you wanted to live a nice, quiet, peaceful life,” General Gibson tells the Junior Stargazers, “you picked the wrong time to get born.”

There’s an amusing visual irony to this warning: Surely being born during a time when meteorites were crashing down onto Earth would have been less peaceful than this. Gibson’s message seems particularly at odds with the sleepy locale. Asteroid City, a western desert town circa 1955, has a population of just 87. There’s one diner, one gas station, and the meteorite crater — a hole in the ground — is noted on a billboard as the town’s “point of interest.” If you can’t find peace here, you might not find it anywhere.

But General Gibson’s speech appears wiser when reconsidered as a prophetic forecast of looming chaos. Not too far from Asteroid City, the military sets off atomic bombs. An unfinished highway ramp, sporadic police shootouts, and plots of land for sale portend a coming urban boom. And that’s not to mention the alien spaceship from above.

The prospect of so many imminent forces beyond our control has a way of making us wonder how we can find the time for the necessities of our own lives. Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), father of Junior Stargazer Woodrow (Jake Ryan), admits to his father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks) over a payphone that he still has not told his children that their mother died, weeks after her death. “The time is never right,” he says.

Augie is not just seeking free time; struck with grief, he struggles to see meaning in much of anything. Augie is emotionally detached from his four children, openly admitting he considered abandoning them. (A terrific sight gag reiterates the distance between Augie and his children at the beginning of the film: When they arrive in Asteroid City Augie drives a tow truck with the family vehicle hooked behind, his children seated inside at an incline. The car broke down, but one can’t help but think Augie prefers it this way.) Even after a miraculous alien encounter, not much changes for Augie. “I don’t feel anything at all,” he says following the extraterrestrial visit.

Scarlett Johansson in Asteroid City

In Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a movie star and mother to another one of the Junior Stargazers, Augie finds a kindred spirit. She articulates what he doesn’t want to admit. “We’re just two catastrophically wounded people who don’t express the depths of our pain because ... we don’t want to,” Midge tells him. Schwartzman and Johansson are outstanding as the melancholic pair, and the film is a fascinating touchpoint for Johansson’s progression as an actor. Two decades ago in Lost in Translation, opposite Anderson stalwart Bill Murray, she filled the role the Junior Stargazers have in Asteroid City, playing the younger character desperately seeking meaning in life. Now she fills the role Murray had in that film, playing the older character with a disengaged attitude that suggests time has taught her life has no meaning. Johansson, like Murray before her, deftly toes the line between whether this attitude makes her smarter than everyone else or simply depressed.

The question of existential meaning is heightened by the meta-narrative structure of Asteroid City: All the events taking place in this western town are, we are told from the very beginning, a fiction. “Asteroid City” is a play, and Anderson’s movie is a filmic adaptation of that play that occasionally cuts away to a making-of story about the writing, casting and production of the play.

Why add this layer? In part it’s to remind us that there is always meaning, because we can’t help but project meaning onto our lives. From the beginning we are told that Asteroid City is “an imaginary creation.” It is a fiction inside a fiction, and Anderson never lets us forget it. Yet the love and the heartache its characters demonstrate feel meaningful all the same, and a scene at the end of the film, in which an actor who doesn’t appear in the play recites lines from a scene we never see, moved me to tears.

Positioning “Asteroid City” as a play within his film also allows Anderson to celebrate the act of artistic creation. The host (Bryan Cranston) of the making-of film tells us that what we are watching is an “authentic account of the inner workings of a modern theatrical production,” and later scenes show just how tenuous this production is. The playwright stumbles onto the perfect lead actor; the other lead nearly quits the show, and in the process of doing so helps the show find its ideal Woodrow. The play itself also mirrors the production of a film, centering a group of creative, curious people sheltered together for a short time, dreaming up the future before going their own ways. (That the real cast of Asteroid City actually stayed in their characters’ cabins during the production of the film speaks to how much Anderson reveres this artistic camaraderie.)

These values necessary for assembling an artistic production — curiosity and creativity — persist despite the fragility and sense of unknown that permeate Asteroid City. This is true for the characters both inside and outside of the play. Within the play, Woodrow and the other Junior Stargazers try to figure out what symbol to project onto the moon to communicate with the alien. “We really need to mean something,” Woodrow tells an adult scientist, Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton). “This is our chance to be actually worthwhile in our lifetimes.” She pulls him aside for an urgent piece of wisdom. “It’s all worthwhile in your lifetime,” she tells him. “Your curiosity is your most important asset. Trust it.”

The interaction mirrors a crisis the actor playing Augie in the “Asteroid City” play has near the end of the film. He walks off the set in the middle of production and goes backstage to ask the director of the play: “Am I doing it right?” The question is posed as Schwartzman stares straight into the camera; the question is for us, and it’s not about the play, but our lives. “I feel like my heart is getting broken every night,” the actor continues. “Do I just keep doing it? Without knowing anything? I still don’t understand the play.” The director (Adrien Brody) responds with an assured, if unsatisfying, answer. “It doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story.”

To be curious, to keep creating: This is the most Anderson can muster in his search for existential meaning. Curiosity in Anderson’s telling is not a tool to find meaning but the source of meaning itself. It feels like Anderson trying to reassure himself. To project symbols onto the moon without being sure of their meaning, it seems, is not all that different from sharing your films with the world.

How can this be enough, despite the pain of life? Shortly after Dr. Hickenlooper tells Woodrow to trust his curiosity she bonds with him over the loss of a parent, telling him, “I’m sorry about your mother. I miss mine too, and she died 46 years ago.” It calls back to an earlier line by Augie, when finally telling his children their mother died, that time does not heal all wounds. “No. Maybe it can be a Band-Aid,” he says. The pain and grief accumulated over a life cannot be eliminated, and this makes maintaining curiosity and creativity a feat of perseverance.

This perseverance is what Stanley is alluding to when he responds to Augie over the payphone. “The time is always wrong,” he tells Augie. You can’t wait for life to give you a breath of fresh air to move forward. As the director tells the actor portraying Augie, you won’t find one. It’s why the heroes of Asteroid City are the Junior Stargazers. Like the young radicals of The French Dispatch or the amateur explorers of Moonrise Kingdom before them, Anderson admires more than anything the curious young people who keep on creating despite the aches they carry. It also makes a line delivered multiple times by Augie, the final time direct-to-camera, an incredible flex by Anderson: “My pictures always come out.” The world is a painful, overwhelming place, but Anderson keeps making his wonderfully intricate works of art all the same.

This is not a happy resolution; Asteroid City does not pretend that creation is a medicine for life’s ills. But it is still something we can hold onto amid the uncertainty. Anderson is the perfect director for this message, an artist who has always contrasted the messiness of the world with unparalleled craft, precision, and control on screen. For these aesthetic signatures he is critiqued for making films that are overly twee, but these criticisms ignore the depth of storytelling that Anderson’s visual choices serve. To ask if there is something more to life — and without masking it in irony or equivocation, simply answer no — that takes gumption.

When the Steenbecks drive away at the end of Asteroid City, their problems are not resolved; their coalition is unsteady. But the gorgeous backdrop they drive into that Anderson created is still a thing of beauty. Life is sad, and possibly meaningless, and full of grief. But the world can also be a bright, vibrant place if we make it so.