Asteroid City review: Wes Anderson prizes style over substance in an allegory for storytelling

"Don't worry about it, just keep telling the story."

So says Adrien Brody's director Schubert Green when Jones Hall (Jason Schwartzman) frets that he doesn't understand the play (within the movie) that he is currently starring in. It could also be the mantra of Asteroid City and the entire oeuvre of director Wes Anderson.

For Asteroid City — in theaters June 16 with a wider release June 23 — isn't merely a mid-century Southwestern jewel box of Americana as diffused through Anderson's piquant eye. It is also an American Playhouse-style black-and-white special detailing the 1950s Actors' Studio approach to writing and mounting the "play" we are predominantly viewing.

Anderson, who directed and co-wrote the film, has always used a Matryoshka doll-esque approach to his storytelling, the layers of his masterfully designed sets and vast ensemble casts collapsing and expanding with the precision of a Mozart symphony. But Anderson compounds that tiered confectionary storytelling structure here, in his 11th feature, with this play-within-a-TV-special-within-a-movie framework.

The special's host, as played by a stentorian Bryan Cranston who seems to be channeling some combination of his stage work in All the Way and Network, wants us to remember that Asteroid City is also a fiction, the drama and ensuing mythology around its mounting as false as the Monument Valley-esque peaks in the background of the titular city.

The plot of the special revolves around dissolute playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) attempting to write and perfect the play, Asteroid City, while the play itself is focused on a Southwestern town whose annual Junior Stargazer convention is upended by the sudden appearance of an alien.

Schwartzman, an Anderson regular, is New York actor Jones Hall, uncertain of his grasp on the play Asteroid City. Within the play, he is widowed war photographer Audie Steenbeck. Schwartzman has always been adept at playing the tragic clown and here, he might give his most wistful performance yet as an actor struggling to understand a play about a man who can only make sense of the world through his camera lens.

He stars opposite Scarlett Johansson's Mercedes Ford, a veteran NY stage actress, who is portraying Midge Campbell, a mid-century movie star in the vein of Elizabeth Taylor or Susan Hayward. Johansson has made something of a career of playing brassy women of this era in projects such as Hail, Caesar! and Jojo Rabbit. But she elevates that to a new level here, barely tamping down Midge's inner melancholy, while also fully giving herself over to the melodramatic tableaus she enacts in her bungalow bathroom.

Johansson and Schwartzman give two stellar performances within a galaxy of gripping ensemble work that treads the line between pastiche and pathos with ease. There's no shortage of films set in the 1940s and '50s, movies that try to replicate the rat-a-tat patter of the Golden Age of Hollywood. But often, contemporary actors feel like they're playing dress-up, their all-too modern selves packaged in the trappings of the time.

One might think that would feel even more the case within the purposeful artifice of Anderson's world — the meticulously framed tableaus; the exquisite Southwestern sets that feel more like Disneyland than the real world; and the comedic language of the tilts, pans, and close-ups of his camera.

What can be said that hasn't been already about the visual style of Anderson's filmmaking (so recognizable that it's a meme)? Suffice it to say that Asteroid City both meets and exceeds the sumptuous artistry and fastidious invention of his previous work.

The deliberate contrivance of the world of the play, Asteroid City, feels more akin to the filmmaking of the era that Anderson is probing than other recent projects that aim for naturalistic verisimilitude to the time. It's clear that's entirely by design when you juxtapose the play's brightly lit exteriors, which conjure a classic studio's overexposed approach to natural light, with the black-and-white classic aspect-ratio realism of the TV special that details the making of the play.

The plays — and artists — that defined Broadway in the '40s and '50s (and reinvented the American theater) were about truth and realism. For artists engaged in the "Method," like the ones we see in a class near the film's conclusion, a good performance is less about acting than it is about being. Yet, the films that built Hollywood and coalesced the concept of movie-making are steeped in a purposeful disconnect between reality and fantasy. There's a reason they called the studios "dream factories."

With Asteroid City, Anderson seems to be philosophizing about that gap between the truth we seek in storytelling and the lush, bravura craftsmanship required to tell it. Asteroid City isn't in any way a cohesive story; it plays as a series of vignettes that don't necessarily build to any grand climax or clear purpose. But like Brody's Schubert instructs Schwartzman's Jones, it isn't really about reaching some greater sense of understanding anyway. Just keep telling the story. (Though admittedly, Anderson seems to care more about theory and style than narrative at this point in his career.)

Near the film's conclusion, the acting students with whom Conrad Earp meets are seized by the mania of repeating the mantra: "You can't wake up if you don't fall asleep." It could be dismissed as "Method" pretension, but it's also potentially the thesis statement of the film and Anderson's views on storytelling as a whole — to find the truth in art, you have to give yourself over to the artifice of the dream. Grade: B

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