Cannes Film Festival 2023: ‘Asteroid City’ Finds Wes Anderson Casting His Eyes Towards The Night Sky

I sometimes wonder about the extent to which Wes Anderson is aware of his image in the public eye. He appears to have put a healthy distance between himself and the discourse-ier view of his generally acclaimed work — the man lives in Paris, seems to mentally occupy several overlapping periods of the past, and as far as we can tell, has never once gone online. But that same remoteness informs the way his most fervent detractors criticize him, painting him as ensconced in his own little world to a solipsistic fault. As they’d have it, he places no investment in the reality of our time or place, content to play with models and miniatures in his hermetically sealed dioramas bereft of any human emotionality. His characters don’t scream or laugh, their inner workings communicated instead through stares of pregnant blankness. He takes more interest in obscure cultural relics, relating his esoteric fascinations through stiffly baroque dialogue almost like a language all its own. The way some people talk about him, you’d think the guy was an alien.

With eyes cast to the night sky, he meets this perception head-on in his marvelous Cannes Film Festival selection Asteroid City, as he passionately refutes the notion that people with reserved manners don’t experience feelings just because they refrain from demonstrative expression. The antic yet quietly melancholy comedy alights on a convention of Junior Stargazers and Space Cadets in a pop-87 desert town on the California-Nevada border, in actuality a freestanding set constructed whole cloth by Anderson and his crew in the arid expanses of Spain. There, five bright youngsters and their parents have gathered to receive commendations for their extraordinary inventions: an incinerating death ray, a functional and safe jet pack, a device that projects iconography onto the surface of the moon. Between items on the official itinerary, the Spock-like kids sit in a circle and challenge each other to memorize lists of scientific pioneers as a game they’re all too smart to lose, more at home “outside the Earth’s atmosphere” than in their respective schools. The grown-ups keep stiff upper lips, but small glimpses at their private pain still bleed through their clipped speech.

In both cases, the demeanors as dry as the parcels of land sold by the local motel’s vending machine conceal deep wells of poignancy, rendered visible by Anderson without the need for a telescope or microscope. Shrapnel still lodged in the back of his head from the second World War, frontline photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) arrives in Asteroid City with his four children in tow, struggling to tell them that their mother died three weeks ago even as his gifted son Woodrow (Jake Ryan, a tremendous find) has his inklings. Screen idol Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) gravitates towards tragic roles because they speak to an abiding sadness close to the core of her being. Head-honcho researcher Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) never started a family of her own, and wonders whether her absence of any desire to do so means that there’s something wrong with her. A byzantine framing device sticks the cinema-styled substance of the plot inside a play inside a TV broadcast inside the movie we’re watching; such an elaborate structure suggests Anderson burrowing further into his own intellect than ever before, but he uses this elaborate structure to squirrel away more moments of hidden desire, missed connections, and lost love.

Between the ersatz American West settlement shown off in a full-circle panning shot, the massive ensemble casting that can lure the likes of Margot Robbie for about seven lines, and the hyper-meticulous light-pastel coloration evoking midcentury “Wish You Were Here!” postcards, Anderson’s work hits a staggering new high of technical involvement. And yet it’s all in service of a script that teases out the intimate motivations behind tinkering, both in mechanical construction and the more abstract processes of acting. Willem Dafoe makes one of the most delightful cameos as a stand-in for Sanford Meisner in the heyday of his legendary Actors Studio, an entire school of thought founded on the principle that intangibles like joy, rage, even rest must be conjured through rigorous discipline. He and his pupils take up the phrase “you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” as a mantra in the film’s mystifying climax, which explicitly leaves its significance open to interpretation. This critic took it as a remark on how truth hides within artifice, that the agreed-upon fakeness of two-dimensional theatrical productions — or a motion picture arranged like one — nonetheless leads us to genuine epiphanies we carry back into our real lives.

“You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”

Anderson’s latest draws its tender potency from the grasping for understanding and the yearning to be understood in an uncharacteristic personal statement from one of the present’s most intently misread auteurs. Around the margins of the humor more “ha-ha” funny than his usual drollery (how he tracked down three little girls with Swiss-watch comic timing beggars belief), his figures of unspoken hurt struggle to comprehend art, God, other people, themselves. We’re all contending with interior dramas about which everyone else knows nothing, and the most beautiful, moving moments in Anderson’s body of work come when broken, isolated personalities can take brief forms of refuge within one another. It’s a miracle every time it happens, no less so than establishing communications with extraterrestrial life. On our confusing planet fraught with random causes to despair, whether for a shy child finding the first peer on their wavelength or an artist calling through the cosmos to his fellow withdrawn sentimentalists, simply making contact is so much more than enough.

Asteroid City will premiere in select theaters in these here United States on June 16, and then rollout nationwide on June 23.

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.