Wes Anderson is a polarizing director. His films’ set design, costuming, casting, performances, and dialogue all make his work instantly recognizable. As a result, some wave off his 30-year body of work as “style over substance.” I disagree. Though his cinematic language is unlike anything seen in the corpus of most English-language directors working today, Anderson’s films tackle important themes in ways that reward our investment in them. Death, loss, grief, family, childhood, loss of innocence, and the artistic vocation are common issues explored in Anderson’s films, and his most recent, Asteroid City, is no exception.
And yet, Asteroid City hits differently from his previous works, or at least it hit me differently. While still certifiably ‘Wes Anderson,’ it is his most explicitly existential film. It is also a more post-modern (or perhaps ‘meta-modern’) film than his others. And, finally, it is a film that grapples more seriously with faith than any of the Episcopalian-raised auteur’s previous works.
A play within a film
Anderson’s first few theatrical features have setups that are easily grasped. Bottle Rocket (1996) is about two friends who attempt to pull off a heist, one exuberantly and one reluctantly. Rushmore (2008) tells the story of a teenage boy (whose mother has died) attending a traditional all-boys school and falling for one of his teachers. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) is about a family of washed-up geniuses whose fickle patriarch tries to reunite them. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) centers around an aging oceanographer seeking revenge on the supposed jaguar shark who devoured his longtime work partner.
Over time, Anderons’ work has become more and more intricate, in terms of direction, set design, and storytelling. His last film before Asteroid City, The French Dispatch, seemed to be a high-water-mark for this increasing complexity. It was an anthology film—something almost unheard of in Anglophone film of recent decades—that used the death of the editor of a New Yorker-type magazine as the framing device for its different tales. The French Dispatch is minutely crafted—arguably more so even than The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), his biggest success to date. Though it is far from my favorite of Wes Anderson’s oeuvre, it has moments of brilliance that the anthology form supports brilliantly.
With Asteroid City, though, Anderson has shifted his storytelling radically, making storytelling itself a key piece of the work. Call it what you like—deconstruction, postmodernism, metamodernism—the film does not tell a straightforward, A-to-B, beginning-to-end story. Instead, it tells the story of a play called Asteroid City, the man who wrote it, and the actors who perform it. To understand better what I mean, it might be helpful to watch the movie’s trailer:
The clips used in the trailer are taken entirely from the ‘play’ within the movie. This play depicts how a disparate group of people—a grieving father, scientists, a famous film actress, Evangelical Christian schoolchildren, child prodigies, cowboys—come together in an extremely small Western-American town in 1955. The town (called “Asteroid City” after a meteorite that landed there eons ago) experiences an alien encounter at the end of the first act of the film, and all those in the town are forced into a week’s quarantine. They are forced to confront each other, and their own failings, in Anderson’s distinctive, whimsical-with-a-touch-of-depression style.
The film itself, though, does not merely depict the play. Instead, it opens on a television set, with a host (played by Bryan Cranston) introducing the play, Asteroid City, and its author, Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). While most of the screen time is taken up with the events of the fictitious play (shown in color), key moments in the film’s narrative occur in the ‘real world’ outside it (shown in black and white). This can be slightly disorienting, but in the hands of Anderson, a consummate filmmaker, this disorientation is clearly deliberate. Viewers confront the main story of Asteroid City, not as passive consumers of entertainment, but as human beings trying to understand the meaning of it all.
And this is precisely the point. The protagonist of the play, Augie Steenbeck (played by the always excellent Jason Scwartzman), is trying to make sense of his life after the death of his wife (Margot Robbie). Similarly, Augie’s romantic interest, the fabulous and famous actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), is sick with a case of weltschmerz, finding no sense of worth in her fame and looking for it in her art. Like these two (and so many other characters in this stuffed-to-the-gills cast), we the viewers are meant to grapple with the meaning of our own lives. However, the existential themes are emphasized by the whiplash that accompanies viewers as they move between the play and its creation and performance.
That being said, Asteroid City is no chore to watch. While it can be discombobulating, Anderson’s style and the excellent performances from a star-studded cast entertain through any confusion a first-time viewer might have. (My one qualm with the film is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it instance of female nudity, but it’s very clear when it’s coming, so it isn’t hard for those who wish to avoid this to simply close their eyes.)
Asteroid City’scharacters are all, in one way or another, confronted with existential questions. Both those in the colorful fictional play and the black-and-white ‘reality’ wrestle with their place in the world and the universe and their roles as mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, prodigies and cowboys, atheists and people of faith.
“Rough” belief in God
It isn’t unusual for one of Anderson’s films to include trappings of Christianity. Characters have been known to make the sign of the cross, delegate saying a Rosary to an underling, or even leave behind normal life in the West to become a Catholic nun in India. However, these are small murmurs in the background, rarely directly addressed by characters or the center of attention. In Asteroid City, God and religion are brought to the forefront at several crucial moments.
When grieving father Augie finally tells his four children (one boy-genius son and identical triplet daughters) that their mother has died, he tells them, “let’s say she’s in Heaven.” He then immediately explains that, since he is an atheist, she is not in Heaven, but since they are Episcopalian, she has, for them, moved on. Augie’s lack of faith is explicitly connected to his trust in science (science being a running theme in the film), but I do not think his is a self-satisfied atheism. It seems almost the atheism of a man too angry with God to believe in him.
Augie’s lack of faith is presented in contrast to the strong faith of June Douglas, a teacher who leads a group of Evangelical schoolchildren through Asteroid City. (June is played by Maya Hawke, a first-timer in a film by Wes Anderson, who famously re-uses many of the same actors across his filmography. Hawke is pitch-perfect in the role, and I hope to see her re-appear in Anderson’s work.) The students are on a field trip in order to learn about the universe. Over the first act, they are shown to be devoted to their faith, even praying on screen. However, once the alien encounter happens, the children begin to ask questions, not about God, but about the alien. June is flustered and unsure how to respond, but she is ultimately able to come to terms with the alien encounter thanks to Montana (Rupert Friend), a cowboy and her romantic interest.
But how does Anderson himself approach religion in the film? I think his own position is best symbolized by Augie’s three daughters. The girls are constantly pretending that they are something other than themselves: mermaids, for instance. But their most abiding imaginary identity is as witches. At one point in the film, they steal their mother’s ashes and attempt to bury them, performing a quasi-Christian, quasi-pagan ceremony. When reflecting on this scene, I was reminded of a double-interview of Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach (who co-wrote two of Anderson’s films) in which the two were asked if they believed in God. Baumbach immediately responded “No,” and, with prompting, Anderson said, “I think so.” Baumbach was taken aback and asked, “Really?” Anderson haltingly answered, “Yeah, I mean … I mean, roughly.”
Asteroid City is not precisely a religious film, but neither is it a purely secular one. Instead, it is best characterized as an existential film where God is given a seat at the table, sitting just between Grief and Nothingness. For the Anderson of Asteroid City, God and religion are part of man’s response, not just to the loss of a loved one, but also to paradigm-shifting events like an alien encounter.
That being said, Anderson’s films defy attempts at simple explanation. They are slippery, but in a compelling, rather than frustrating way. Whenever you feel you have grasped some part in a firm way, you recognize something that doesn’t so much refute what you said before as complicate it. In the case of God’s place in this work, it is important to recognize that ideas about religion in Asteroid City are inextricably bound up with ideas about artistic production.
At the climactic moment of the film (spoilers ahead in this paragraph), the line between the colorful play and the monochrome ‘real’ world is crossed. The actor who portrays Augie leaves the set, as his struggles to understand the character he’s playing (which have been mounting over the course of the production) have led him to a near existential crisis. He questions Schubert Green (Adrien Brody) in a scene that is simultaneously heartbreaking and life-affirming. He asks if he is doing a good job and confesses that he understands neither his character nor the play itself. Green responds that it “doesn’t matter,” and that he needs to “Just keep telling the story.”
This is, I think, where the existential, religious, scientific, and artistic themes of Asteroid City are unified. In Anderson’s world, man is not given to know all that concerns him. But man is not, primarily, a knowing being, but an acting one. If he is to find meaning, he must keep going on acting his part.
At this claim, some more classically-trained minds (including my own) might bristle. Man is, after all, defined by Aristotle as the “rational animal.” However, I don’t think Anderson is disputing this. He is not necessarily claiming that we cannot know important truths. Instead, he is interrogating what happens when our purely intellectual understandings of the world (something like what St. John Henry Newman would call “notional knowledge”) do not satisfy us in the face of the world’s instability. What do we do when we hit a wall? What do we do when our spouse dies? What do we do when the world is turned upside-down by a world-shattering event? What do we do when we realize, to put it bluntly, that we understand neither ourselves nor our world?
Anderson’s answer, whether in life, faith, studies, or art, is twofold: Accept it. And keep going.
