‘Asteroid City’, by Wes Anderson: when Broadway met the West, already in Ecuadorian theatres

Asteroid City is a desert city in the Southwestern United States. The year is 1955. The city’s most famous attraction is a giant meteor crater and a nearby celestial observatory. In one weekend, the military and astronomers welcome five science award-winning kids to show off their inventions. Not far away, above the hills, are the mushroom clouds of the nuclear tests.

The stage is set for Wes Anderson’s new film, a light-hearted comedy, dazzlingly crafted and full of visuals you can look in and out of, and also as deeply felt as any of Anderson’s previous works.

What begins as a party celebrating the achievements of the Junior Stargazers gets an unexpected visitor: an alien. Asteroid City has been shut down and the military concocts a false story, but the Young Geniuses, a group reminiscent of the youngsters in Steven Spielberg’s classics, have a plan to break the news to the outside world.

‘Asteroid City’ was presented at Cannes: Wes Anderson’s film brings together actors Tom Hanks and Scarlett Johansson

However, the story is bigger than that. The characters from Asteroid City are on stage preparing a play called Asteroid City. And at this point, the director invites his audience to venture behind the scenes and delve into the lives of artists circa 1955. Actors hone their craft and soon become stars.

The events we see are a play within a play. “Ultimately you’re watching an actress playing an actress playing an actress,” the director explains The French shipping (2021). They are two different worlds that Anderson has so cleverly devised and weaved into one, bringing us into the life of the character and its creator at the same time.

Anderson’s Essence

The 1 hour and 40 minute film is a new kind of storytelling for Wes Anderson, but at the same time familiar in feel and mood. It’s a dreamlike place to contemplate the universe: love and loneliness, pain and hope, the meaning of life (and death).

Anderson always takes his audience places they’ve never been before, with amazing detail, but the essence of his world-building is always rooted in the individuals who populate the world.

Augie, a recently widowed war photographer, arrives in Asteroid City with his three young daughters and teenage son Woodrow (Jake Ryan), a winner of the Junior Stargazer Convention. It is the celebration of Asteroid Day weekend, which commemorates September 27, 3007 BC. C., when the Arid Plains meteorite hit Earth.

Also present is Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a movie star, and her daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards), visiting Asteroid City. junior stargazer, along with three other Space Cadet Award winners. And to host the festivities, five-star general Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) and astronomer Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) on them.

The presenter (Bryan Cranston) warns about this on a television studio, circa 1950: “Asteroid City does not exist. It is an imaginary drama created especially for this broadcast. The characters are fictional; the text, hypothetically; the events are an apocryphal fabrication, but together they present an authentic account of the inner workings of a modern theatrical production.

The lives and imaginations of young people are also a recurring theme in Anderson’s films. Hugely independent, sometimes vulnerable in the midst of the difficulties of growing up, imaginative yet witty: essentially the recognizable experience of childhood and adolescence that we all live or have lived through. In Asteroid City, like Rushmore and Moonrise Kingdom, it is a group of teenagers that sets the plot in motion. The five junior stargazers they do what children do best: inspire great pride while worrying their anxious parents, gently find love, and navigate their way through uncertainty to new possibilities.

More than any Wes Anderson movie, Asteroid City is steeped in the history and myths of two poles of 1950s America: the West and Broadway, each with its own heroes and legends. Against a backdrop of post-war paranoia, closely guarded nuclear secrets and great inventions, Americans are starting to look to the stars.

Moreover, in 1955 the feeling penetrated the world of technology and science: that everything is possible, including putting a man on the moon.

It was precisely that feeling, the desire to build new worlds, that was felt so strongly in art. A revolution that began on stage in the 1930s and 1940s culminated in the 1950s with the work of Tennessee Williams and stars such as James Dean and Marlon Brando. Those kind of people are the ones we meet while we perform Asteroid City. The city may be almost nowhere, but Anderson’s film gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the actors, both in and out of character, and where Broadway meets the West.

“When I wanted to make movies, that period was the center of everything,” Anderson recalls. “We were watching The godfather And cab driver and Brian dePalma. But maybe even more: Marlon Brando and James Dean, Montgomery Clift and Kazan. The emotion of that movie era and its relationship to the stage; that block of movies I’m talking about and maybe it starts with A streetcar named Desire. Tennessee Williams is a great voice for this urgency and hurt feeling of these characters.”

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