South By SouthWes: A Review Of Asteroid City

Wes Anderson directs “Asteroid City”

One of the mystery refrains of Wes Anderson’s eleventh feature, “Asteroid City,” is “All my pictures come out.” (A photographer styled after Stanley Kubrick; confidence.) And another: “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.” (The madness of The Method.) Plus: “Meep-meep!” (The Roadrunner abides.)

We are in Asteroid City, population 87, betwixt Parched Gulch to the left and Arid Plains to the right, hard by a horizon-distant open-air nuclear testing facility, celebrating Asteroid Day 1955. Characters arrive, criss and cross. Mushroom clouds thumb the sky. An alien comes. (It’s Jeff Goldblum, after a fashion.)

Mad patterns are there for the constellating. This is a movie under the influences. Of course, “Asteroid City” is recognizably of his composition. Already compiled are reading lists and clusters of concerns and dapples and stipples of things that simply scintillate, that caress the retina or flatter the fingertips. So many lists!

This muted, jam-packed yet strangely sad picture, this hallucination of mid-century America is both intellectual and tactile, and curious in combination, confident yet insolent bricolage that combines whatever he was reading for a hammock of time. Anderson newcomer Tom Hanks’ character puts it this way: “I’m in no hurry–I like the desert, I like aliens.” (Paul Schrader has compared the film to the mirror-lined labyrinth of “Last Year at Marienbad.”)

Author Ian Penman describes Rainer Werner Fassbinder in “Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors, ” his recent book of spiraling musings about that filmmaker, “‘Querelle’ is his most auteurist film. It’s like a film based on his filmography, images of images. The style is so total, eclipsing what there is of a story, almost as if he is saying there’s no story left to tell.” 

“Asteroid City”

At many moments, the non-stop cockeyed caravan with no climactic detonations of “Asteroid City” (despite, say, the nuke tests) feels the same way, the story at the end of story, or stories within stories past the earlier stories. It muses and meanders and compounds. There is some singing. As car mechanic Matt Dillon tells Jason Schwartzman’s brood as they’re stranded in this isolated setting: “Everything’s connected, but nothing’s working.”

To get it out of the way, the primary cast of “Asteroid City” consists of Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan, Jeff Goldblum, Grace Edwards, Aristou Meehan, Sophia Lillis, Ethan Josh Lee and the triplets Ella, Gracie and Willan Faris.

Anderson localizes his shoots, for production efficiency and to encourage bonhomie among his pack. “How long did you search for, and where else did you look, before finding your Asteroid City in Chinchón, Spain?” asks the interviewer in the June issue of Little White Lies (which is dedicated to the film). “I found the place myself on Google maps looking for places that, seen from satellite imagery, were yellow in Europe,” Anderson voice-messages the journalist. “You end up in Spain and you look for flat places and, frankly, flat places with a very close four-star hotel—not too expensive of a hotel, but very comfortable where you can have a cast be happy and then be close by the set because, essentially, what I like to do is live right next to the set. So we found the place to create our desert.” (The end credits memorialize the contributions of the waiters at the hotel where the unit was ensconced for the duration.)

Previously, before its incarnation on Spanish soil (where Orson Welles reportedly shot “Chimes at Midnight”) this desert had resided in “Bad Day At Black Rock”; Roadrunner cartoons; the canvases of recently passed anachronist Bruce McCall; the films of Sergio Leone, the two-dimensional dreamland of George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat”; the plays of Sam Shepard and “Zabriskie Point” (which was co-written by Shepard). And “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind,” yes, very much so. And, a “Twilight Zone”-styled narrator who shuffles the nested-egg levels of reality: a black-and-white TV broadcast about a stage production that we see in the form of a feature film. (Not to mention the succession of tiny chapter titles and subtitles.)

“Asteroid City”

Each thread of Milena Canonero’s costumes transfixes: another layer of bespoke eyeball stroke. The palette, largely screaming azure and robin’s-egg blue, so many deracinated blues, and simmering or blazing orange is akin to a sun-blanched version of that of Godard’s sunny “Contempt.” These are pallid rotogravure colors of Sunday supplements bound with twine for decades in bales in a tenant’s basement storage compartment.

Scrapbooks were still a thing in the 1950s, longitudinal foolscap pages to be dressed with memorabilia and adhered with mucilage. There are scrapbooks in the wake of this scrapbook of a film—the customary Matt Zoller Seitz coffee-table book interview; the Faber edition of the screenplay; and “DO NOT DETONATE Without Presidential Approval: A Portfolio on the Subjects of Mid-century Cinema, the Broadway Stage and the American West.”

Anderson has a lot on his mind at any given time and that prompts others to open their brains, too. “Do Not Detonate” incorporates informative material on Elia Kazan; television’s “Playhouse 90″; Jorge Luis Borges on “The Petrified Forest”; writing on Billy Wilder’s “Ace In The Hole,” Vincente Minnelli’s “Some Came Running”; “Desert Fury”; “Bad Day At Black Rock,” “Fail Safe,” “On The Waterfront,” “The Misfits,” “Fool for Love,” “Nashville,” Truffaut’s “Small Change” and “Wild to the Wild” by Sam Shepard and “Marilyn Monroe and the Loveless World,” by Jonas Mekas.

That’s not a concordance, that’s a door-to-door encyclopedia set! Still, all the references and cross-references and signs of mid-century America stretched across the (mostly) widescreen pageant aren’t explicable without the tale nor are they meant to be, they’re emblematic and there they sit, pleasingly inscrutable.

“Twenty years went past at the speed of a dream,” says a character; as does “Asteroid City.”

“Asteroid City” is now playing.