‘Asteroid City’ review: Love, loss, storytelling and aliens collide in Wes Anderson’s 1955 desert dreamland

Wes Anderson’s latest mirage, “Asteroid City,” carries a lighter and literally sunnier spirit than usual for this filmmaker, whose sense of whimsy can sometimes curdle into, well, a bit of a load. Shooting in Spain, creating a drolly imagined Eisenhower-era desert town out of both practical and digital design elements, the big-sky, open-air setting of “Asteroid City” does something to Anderson’s fiercely hermetic and controlled aesthetic. Coming off the suffocating elaborations of his previous picture, “The French Dispatch,” this movie amounts to a similar risk with greater rewards.

Director Anderson and his frequent co-writer Roman Coppola set their tale(s) in 1955. In black-and-white, and a boxy aspect ratio, we’re presented first with a “Playhouse 90″-type TV program, hosted by Bryan Cranston in Rod Serlingesque tones. Tonight’s play, he tells us, is “Asteroid City,” in his words “an imaginary drama created expressly for this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication — but together they present an authentic account of the inner workings of a modern theatrical production.”

So: It’s a play, written by a Wyoming-bred variation on Tennessee Williams or William Inge, played by Edward Norton. It’s also the story of the people staging this televised world premiere, under the creative sway of Actors Studio-style methods of psychological exploration and performance techniques. Adrien Brody plays the director. Jason Schwartzman plays the leading actor, insecure about his progress in the role; Scarlett Johansson plays the nominal female lead. (Anderson movies never quite do well enough by the women on-screen.)

The scenes from “Asteroid City,” the play, unfold as a big, bright movie in widescreen color. (The cinematographer of “Asteroid City” is Robert D. Yeoman; the splendid production design came from Adam Stockhausen, who won an Oscar for Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”) The town of Asteroid City, somewhere in the American Southwest, hits the screen like a study in Formica, pastels, motor courts and atomic bombs going off in the distance.

Each year brings the Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention, where children compete for the best new inventions of the jetpack or functional ray gun variety. One of this year’s winning inventors, Woodrow (Jake Ryan), has three sisters (Ella, Gracie and Willan Faris) and one remote father, a war photographer (Schwartzman) whose wife died three weeks ago. He has not told his children the news because, as he eventually, reluctantly admits: “The time was never right.”

The convention gathers both townspeople (Steve Carell plays the friendly motel manager, owner of a martini-dispensing vending machine) and visitors alike. The most conspicuously glamorous guest is the Kim Novak-ian/Marilyn Monroe-vian movie star portrayed by Johansson. In the black-and-white theater sequences, the same actors play the actors behind the roles. Much more goes on, chiefly an alien visitation that leads to a military and government lockdown. Tom Hanks plays the gruff father-in-law of the Schwartzman character; Tilda Swinton handles the role of an astronomer who says, in a cleverly dodgy line: “I never had children. Sometimes I wonder if I wish I should have.”

The narrative may defy easy recaps, but it’s easier to swing with it in the watching. On first viewing, a central limitation relates to Schwartzman, for whom the leading role was conceived and written. He does not easily suggest James Dean-brand brooding charisma. Nor, in this all-star ensemble of deadpan ringers, can he easily capture glimmers of interior feeling behind the orderly Anderson facade of the characters. Johansson can do it; Jeffrey Wright can do it (he plays a buttoned-down general); new to this director, Hanks can do it. But it is not easy, and without those glimmers, there’s just not enough.

Anderson has acknowledged that he and co-writer Coppola thought a lot about early Sam Shepard when they began writing “Asteroid City.” This was after they got hemmed in by their original idea of making a movie about a play set in an automat. Does the Asteroid City/Manhattan contrast, the story’s central tension between cinematic and theatrical mythmaking, rhyme in interesting ways? Yes. Sometimes. Other times, it’s more a case of two ideas separated by two, maybe three time zones, conversing somewhat awkwardly.

What I like about “Asteroid City” is its sheer visual beauty, spiced with sweetness, and occasional dashes of real feeling. The quick-time banter keeps the movie moving, especially when delivered by superbly equipped actors such as Johansson and Hope Davis, who share a tasty overlapping exchange outside a communal shower. This too feels different for Anderson: He’s discovering the value of the rhythmic change-up, and he’s trying some new things here, establishing a compositional pattern and then playing with it, to keep us amused and slightly off-guard.

There are moments in “Asteroid City” when the play-within-a-play-within-a-movie strategy recalls a line spoken by Matt Dillon’s town mechanic character: “Everything’s connected but nothing’s working.” Then, voila: an unaccountably funny highway shootout comes and goes, in a flash. Or else it’s a glancing moment of connection between two characters at odds, or at a remove. For all the acknowledged reference points at work here, from Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole” to Wim Wenders’ “Paris, Texas,” Anderson keeps inventing and detailing new unrealities to explore. They don’t all satisfy, certainly not the same way, but they’re his, and nobody else’s. And this is his best movie since “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”

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'ASTEROID CITY”

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for brief graphic nudity, smoking, and some suggestive material)

Running time: 1:45

How to watch: In theaters Friday

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