Asteroid City: Fetishizing the Fifties

Wes Anderson turns nuclear terror and 50s paranoia into one of his still-life dioramas. It doesn’t work but manages to evoke a nostalgia for a time that never quite existed.

One hallmark of American pop culture is the way it eternally turns back on itself, returning to past eras in efforts at nostalgia or reinterpretation. When I was a kid, George Lucas’ American Graffiti spurred a rush of attempts to recapture the “innocence” of the 1950s and early 60s, best typified by TV shows such as “Happy Days.”

Much of this was furthered by a desire to escape the upheaval and the subsequent ennui that characterized the late 60s and 1970s, a gaze backward to a time when things were supposedly simpler. Of course, that’s the trap of nostalgia, the selective recall of a bygone moment that conveniently overlooks facts that don’t support the thesis. For many Americans the 50s weren’t so swell. This longing extended to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, a rejection of not just Jimmy Carter, but the complexities of the modern age. Reagan offered the revival of a certain 1950s essence that could be boiled down to something close to that old slogan about baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet. (Along with a reboot of the Cold War, naturally.)

Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City takes this idea to the extreme, as Anderson is prone to do, in what if I were in a worse mood I might call cinema’s first two-dimensional movie. Although to be honest, my mood isn’t great.

Quick disclaimer: Like many, I remain on board with much of the director’s work, particularly his early stuff such as Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. I’m a defender of The Aquatic Life with Steve Zissou and believe Anderson may have hit a career peak with The Grand Budapest Hotel. He is immensly talented.

But Anderson has always walked an extremely fine line between cinematic splendor and sheer mannerism. In other words, he’s quite the fancy pants. And it’s a style so painstakingly crafted and at times so hermetically sealed that it can get on your nerves and sink his lesser films such as The French Dispatch.

The conceit of Asteroid City is that it’s a movie about a documentary that reveals the behind-the-scenes staging of a play. The play “Asteroid City” however is then presented like a movie on a studio backlot with all of the artificiality that implies. You got that? Good. Because I don’t think I can write it again. With its bright blue skies and vibrant tan and brown landscapes, the film looks like a vintage postcard sprung to life. The buildings seem to have no depth. The people don’t fare much better.

Jason Schwartzman plays Augie, the down-in-the-dumps father of four whose wife has recently passed. He’s supposed to be a famous photographer because he smokes a pipe and continually wears a camera around his neck. Scarlett Johansson plays Midge, a movie star hiding out with her unglamorous but brainy daughter. (Think Ava Gardner on the lam.) Tom Hanks is around as Augie’s can-do Dad, all gruff competence, whitewall tires and steady golf scores. They’re stuck in the postage-stamp town of Asteroid City, a place deep in the desert that sits near a nuclear test site, for a gathering of junior wanna-be scientists.

The opening credits gives you a quick sense of what Anderson is striving for. A freight train rolls through the desert carrying the totems of Americana: cattle, grapefruits, farm equipment, Oldsmobiles and nuclear missiles (complete with a “Do Not Detonate Without Presidential Approval” sticker). These were the clashing elements that forged the 50s, when the country was expanding into a global economic powerhouse while operating under the threat of complete annihilation. Prosperity and terror went hand-in-hand.

Except there is little of that tension to be found in Asteroid City, even as mushroom clouds periodically form on the horizon. They might as well be weather balloons. The characters barely register what they are seeing. Anderson seems to be saying nuclear tests were just as quaint as 65-cent hamburgers. There are some nods to 50s-style government paranoia after the town’s inhabitants are quarantined, but that turns out to be just a device for our two leads to make romantic small talk with each other.

That being said, as with much of Anderson’s work, there’s a certain child-like wonder that threads through the movie, a reminder of when kids dreamed of the heavens and peered up at the stars though home-made telescopes, (Today, they would be designing robots or video games or working for Elon Musk.) The movie evokes a time that only partially existed, an era of the World’s Fair, Chuck Yeager, and the International Geophysical Year. A time when science was not only appreciated but honored. When it was viewed as a noble calling.

There are touches that linger, such as Augie’s wise young daughters, who are so charming when they appear that I almost forgave the movie everything. There’s the way Anderson captures a certain kind of American idyll, from the family station wagon to the expansive board on the diner wall that lists every sort of short-order meal imaginable, to the games smart kids create on their own. ¹

Anderson’s actors, as always, are up for it, even as they struggle at times to animate the starchy dialogue and break free of emotional cocoons that enwrap almost every character in the movie. The director’s films do best when there is a star such as Gene Hackman or Bill Murray who can wink a bit at viewers and reassure them there are indeed some real humans in there. In Asteroid City, only Johansson and Hanks really step up to the plate in that department with Hanks, in particular, showing layers of deep regret beneath his all-business exterior. Like several Anderson protagonists, Schwartzman’s character is a man who has become so suffocated by grief that he can barely function. (See also, Ben Stiller in Tenenbaums.)

Anderson is trying to say something about loss and loneliness. But it’s hard to connect with the film because it’s all surface features, a Cadillac with lovely lines that can’t make it out of the parking lot. And that tension between prosperity and self-destruction, it still exists. Last week, I watched an episode of a current TV show, “Paradise,” in which a climate disaster destroys most of life on Earth. It was the same day that the new administration fired almost 1,000 workers at the nation’s leading climate science agency. But hey, the financial markets were thriving, so shrug emoji.

Asteroid City doesn’t work very hard to address those kinds of crosscurrents. But like I said at the outset, maybe it’s just me. Anderson is the ultimate Your Mileage May Vary director, and his fans are legion. It may not be fair for me to demand reality from him. These days, people are entitled to be wistful.

WHERE CAN I WATCH IT: Asteroid City is rentable on all major platforms.

HEY ISN’T THAT: Yeah, the small-town grease monkey is played by 80s stalwart Matt Dillon, billed only as “the mechanic.” It’s good to see him again.

ARMAGEDDON INDEX: (0/10) The nuclear tests occur within the movie within the play within the documentary, so yeah, no impact.

DUST CLOUDS: The International Geophysical Year was a scientific exchange program in 1957-58 in which 67 countries participated, including the United States and the Soviet Union. In that way, it represented a bit of a thaw in the Cold War. But the goodwill generated by global cooperation was shattered when the Soviets launched the first satellite into space, Sputnik I, in late 1957, stunning the U.S. and sparking fears that the nation had fallen behind Russia in terms of technological advancement. The IGY was immortalized in song by former Steely Dan member Donald Fagen in 1982 during the early Reagan administration. (See how all of this fits together? It’s like a tapestry.)

TOP OF THE POPS: The number-one song on the Billboard charts on June 16, 2023 when Asteroid City was released was “Last Night” by Morgan Wallen.

WHAT ELSE I’M WATCHING: TV: “Paradise” (S1, Hulu), “The White Lotus” (S3, MAX), “Reacher” (S3, Amazon), “Green Acres” (Pluto). Movies: McClintock! (McLaghlen, 1963), Bite the Bullet (Brooks, 1975).

LAST ENTRY: 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)

NEXT ENTRY: Crimson Tide (1995) plus my top 10 Gene Hackman movies!

1. Augie’s luggage is labeled with his last name “Steenbeck.” But when the bags are mounted on the roof of the car, the label becomes “Steinbeck,” which must have been a purposeful tribute to the restless American writer who wrote about traversing the nation’s highways.