Asteroid City

As with Beau Is Afraid an audience might be tempted to ask 'What is real?' and as with that film the answer is "Nothing. It's a movie". Save that Asteroid City is, within the confines of its creation, also a play.

That is, to be clear, the form of theatrical endeavour. That clarification required though because here Wes Anderson is indulging in play. Asteroid City is (chapter delineations notwithstanding, intermission optional) the setting of a play that is the subject of a television programme about its writing and staging. Those that move between these three places (or four or more) are as startling in their visitations as any others.

The palette of this 1950s desert town is a particular form of artificial, another of several hyper- and nested- realities. Robert D Yeoman's ninth feature collaboration as cinematographer for Anderson captures model-work and stop-motion and matte-paintings and other forced perspectives and in one of its touches made by more modern mechanisms a nod (or even bobbing head) towards Tex Avery or Chuck Jones. Alexandre Desplat's score has the ring of Looney Tunes or Merrie Melodies, skiffle inflections even as black and flame and chrome and gunfire herald the rockabilly apocalypse to come.

"Why does he burn his hand?" is a question once asked that invites answers at various removes. A modernity that is receiving its first post, letters heralding a new era one A-bomb at a time. There are vending machines and acting methods, six-guns in golf shorts and ray guns in montage. We are variously guests of several hosts, again at multiple removes.

There is the Motel Manager (Steve Carell), and though most stay with him it's at the invitation of General Gibson (Geoffrey Wright). He might share his name with a cocktail but he's far from the only power in the mix. Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks) will be receiving son-in-law Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), daughters Andromeda, Pandora and Cassiopeia (the Faris sisters), son Woodrow (Jake Ryan). All of them, especially the witches three, characters, but Steenbeck doubly. Hosted also by Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), and discussed at variable depth by our Host (Bryan Cranston). Changing focus within Asteroid City the astronomer Dr Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) but creating focus its director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody).

Within and without, as parallel as those tracks heading to infinity to Augie and Woodrow, Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and Dinah (Grace Edwards). Counting down to something, a nod perhaps to other Days The Earth Stood Still even without a role from Jeff Goldblum that serves as another core sample of layered artificiality. Steenbeck is a widower, penned by another man, himself written (variously) by other men, Anderson, naturally, frequent collaborator Roman Coppola too.

There's a cowboy band, a song from Jarvis Cocker, stages real and in miniature, a bridge to nowhere whose forlorn ambition will ring true to anyone who has been in Glasgow city centre. The ground is covered in plots, the boundaries between Asteroid City and the rest of the world drawn in barbed wire and metaphor. Make it a double-bill with Synecdoche, New York, assume the twice daily train is still running and that you've the three days and change to spare.

Train journeys here too, variously lettered. A hobbyist's perspective from atop some flavour of diesel electric intent towards an intermittently nuclear punctuated horizon. A voyeur's perspective from the fourth partition of a train-car named despair. Performances in cabins and doorways framing performances in windows and shower-curtains that reframe other interactions with other frames in yet more mediums.

The other day on Radio 4xtra I heard an older programme of Robin Ince's, where he talked about what it must have been like to be in an early audience for Waiting For Godot and not know he wouldn't show. The joke of course was that someone contacted him perhaps via the site now formerly known as Twitter to say "Thanks a lot!" for spoilers for a play then slightly less far on its way to 70 years old. Knowing what is probably coming doesn't make it any less absurd, and Asteroid City is about impact. Literally so, literarily so, a moment constructed around a moment considered. It looks backwards, forwards, is itself encircled.

Within the cast I name in part above other parts and other names. Notably not within the troupe here Bill Murray but that was a mixture of Covid and circumstance. Sometimes casts need wrapped in cotton wool or Tom Cruise style layers of artifice and sometimes it is nutshells and straw. Sometimes also it is desert earth and tupperware. Among the actors acting are actors acting as actors acting, actors not acting as actors not acting, actors acting as actors not acting, and so on. Willem Dafoe has played men on the edge of wakefulness before but on a stage set that is not a stage it is not only for Antichrist that chaos reigns. See the sleepers walk. Hear them ask another question.

Every once in a while the layers bleed into one another so a moment at the microphone or an errant entity is and is not an incursion of the more real into the less real, all in the pristine artifice of movie-making to the surreal. There is a craft that might be a three-dimensional outgrowth of a fourth-dimensional ideal but tesseract implies tesseractors, tesserdirectors, tesserecursively each fourth-wall tesserer than the last. Tesser this desert ville finding something hardy among its own doubling and standards.

This is Anderson's eleventh feature and as I remarked in review of his tenth "I had written to myself a suggestion that I avoid the words 'troupe' and 'mannered' and 'self indulgent' but here we are" (again).

Asteroid City is sufficiently artificial that in addition to being a hamlet wrapped around a meteorite impact crater it is also the name of a play set in that playground. A play that plays with sets, recursion, train sets, the usual business of propriety and grief and systems of understanding and inevitably balconies. We could say it's about flying saucers but there might be more of Shakespeare than Spielberg. Rude mechanical interruptions make things happen, plot is brought about by things lowered from the heavens. If Asteroid City had been transposed to some middle-English mileux one might have expected pubs called the Rose & Crowns and the Gilded Tern but even I shudder to think of how the relevant diocese would be pronounced.

Of course I adored it. Anderson has absolute command of his craft and his cast are moulded to it. I beamed as brightly as the lights that were not the sun when it finished, rapt, wrapped up in artifice. I was watching a bird dancing, as if on a hot plate, only not. Roots of cinema go back to sideshows, the carnival, nightmare alley and beyond. A reminder here that however much it draws from its own traditions it is something itself, and special.