Being able to untangle what is happening on which emotional plane is the part of Asteroid City that will make it last, provided one has the patience to do so. The test of the film is if, in spite of the artifice and the purposeful world-breaking within the play, the beats still work. This has always been my takeaway from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, where Lynch is telling the characters and by extension the viewer that they’re being manipulated, and then proceeds to pull the emotion out anyway. Asteroid City flirts with that level of success at times, but it’s a primal success as opposed to an informed one. Anderson has long built his films in anticipation of the one big moment. Life Aquatic lives or dies on one, as does each segment of The French Dispatch. There are two such moments in Asteroid City, both of which take place in the black-and-white world, and if they work, I have no idea why. They have the feeling of something that does, shot and scored to be meaningful, even as what’s happening is either puzzling or artificial. It’s a rare film experience to have that kind of disconnect between head and heart.
By producing that kind of experience, however, Asteroid City might be pulling off a genius synchronicity between theme and execution. A common thread between both spheres is unknowing. The characters at the science contest are all looking for knowledge, and repeatedly butt up against the edges of their understanding. Tilda Swinton’s scientist has been close to a breakthrough her whole career but can’t make the final leap. Jeffrey Wright’s general dismisses his life’s twists and turns with a melancholy ‘that’s life.’ Augie doesn’t have answers for his children about why their mother died or where she is now, and the girls invent witchy rituals to make sense of it. No one knows what the alien wants. In the black-and-white acting world, unknowing takes the form of dissecting Earp’s writing for the why’s of character choices. There are many reasons why a character might make a strange choice, but Earp refuses to definitively land on one. The setting of the film in the burgeoning atomic age and the wake of WWII adds to the futile questioning of it all. Perhaps a film about the urge to ask why and the universe’s impassive refusal to respond could only land its emotional beats in ways that are just as opaque to the viewer as they are to the characters.
Anderson’s tradition of giant ensembles continues with Asteroid City, bringing in his usual actors like Schwartzman and Swinton and incorporating new faces like Johannson and Hope Davis, who’s somehow never been in an Anderson film. In the former basket, Schwartzman finds grace notes within what’s ostensibly a flat performance, like the flatness is a rut that the character knows he’s in but can’t break out of, while Brody’s director has a bit of physical business with a fake speed bag that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. For newcomers to Anderson’s stable, Hanks brings a gruffer tone to a role that Bill Murray clearly said no to for some reason. It’s Maya Hawke who’s making the play for a bigger role in Anderson’s next film. She plays a schoolteacher taking her class on a field trip, and her response to the film’s events is to act like everything’s normal. It’s a thematically-related D or E plot, and she and her kids provide a cheerier outpost.
After two viewings, Asteroid City has yet to fully click despite its Andersonian charms. A major upgrade seems possible, provided the stereotypical bulletin board with pins and colored strings gets worked out over what each character is feeling in each of the film’s spheres. Anderson hasn’t made a linear live-action film since Moonrise Kingdom, and with the spate of Roald Dahl shorts he just released, his attention span may have shortened to the point where he’s no longer interested in a straightforward 100 minute story. He’s proven capable of greatness in all kinds of forms. Asteroid City might be a step too far in one direction. B