The actor doesn’t understand the point of the play he’s in, as Anderson fluidly links the struggle to find an artistic thread with the efforts to make sense of life. In this film’s myriad nesting realities, Augie is established as being played by an actor who had an affair with Earp while struggling to find the character. The central story of “Asteroid City” concerns a father, Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), who’s struggling to find a way to tell his three precocious children that their mother has died. Anderson wants to move you while pushing you to acknowledge the artifices involved in crafting a pretend story that affects the audience emotionally. The answer is that “Asteroid City” is a deliberately alienating movie. It’s going to be tempting for people to ask why the frames-within-frames are necessary, however. It sounds belabored, but Anderson establishes the rules of the game within minutes, before the opening credits have unspooled. That’s the shell that the trailers have been selling, and it’s the majority of “Asteroid City.” Within the special about Conrad’s life, which includes details about the staging of the play with fictional legends of a school of acting that’s clearly a gloss on the Method, we see the play itself dramatized as a Wes Anderson movie. In the outer shell, we are watching a black-and-white TV special with a host (Bryan Cranston) concerned with the life of the legendary playwright, Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), who’s cut from the tortured, closeted cloth of Tennessee Williams and who wrote a metaphorical play about tourists out in desert encountering an alien, while mushroom clouds sprout up from A-bomb testing. The trailers allow one to think that “Asteroid City” is a kooky Anderson movie set out in the desert in the 1950s with a potential for alien hijinks, but there’s an elaborate framing device that crystallizes the movie’s essence. If characters’ hobbies are their identity embodied, then we are seeing here a playland concocted from psychological detritus. “Asteroid City” is the next logical step for Anderson, as it is set predominantly in the fantasy projection of an often offscreen character. Anderson takes a Godard theme-that we are what we consume-and spins it into the stuff of despairing fantasia. You can fail to respond to an Anderson film, and I barely got through “The French Dispatch,” and still bow your head in respect to the phenomenal craftsmanship and the subliminal character portraiture. There’s a faultlessly timed sight gag early in “The French Dispatch” in which a drink tray rotates under the control of offscreen hands that load it with lovingly crafted drinks of the staff of a New Yorker- type magazine. With more money and confidence, Anderson continues to dive deeper into minutiae. These are not merely excuses for Anderson to take a bow and linger over his amazing set designs, but the manna of the movies. Think of the montages that litter every Anderson film, in which characters explain their hobbies to their audience. It feels like an autobiographical touch, especially in retrospect, as Anderson has devoted his cinema to characters attempting to process the unpredictability of life via art and other obsessions. When someone falls, he moves them under a streetlamp for better lighting, sanitizing the chaos of life with his art. I’ll never forget the grieving boy in “Rushmore” who plunges himself into the theater as well as every other possible pursuit. Every image has been calibrated to achieve a specific effect - in terms of what people mean when they speak of filmmakers who create “pure cinema,” Anderson couldn’t be a better candidate. Whether or not you enjoy the movies of Wes Anderson, the complaint that he’s a stylist at the expense of substance brutally misses the point.
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