The human drama of the Asteroid City portion of the film, which finds Augie, his father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks), and the Steenback children, among others, negotiating with awful grief, is interrupted by not one but two visitations by an alien spacecraft. The new knowledge of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe solves nobody’s problems—it just obliges them to stay in the desert for at least another week. Looking out their cabin windows at each other, Augie and Midge compare notes, with Midge concluding, “We’re just two catastrophically wounded people who don’t express the depths of our pain because … we don’t want to.”
Johansson is utterly beguiling in a half-enigmatic, half-quietly-blunt mode, while Schwartzman’s performance is revelatory. The actor—who played Max Fischer and has participated in nearly all of Anderson’s films since—shows a new maturity here, gravitas practically, playing a helpless man rather than a stunted adolescent. The nature of his role—in addition to playing Augie, he plays the actor playing Augie, an actor-playwright Earp is initially reluctant to cast—allows him to forge two discrete romantic affiliations (one a maybe, one a definitely), which makes his performance doubly tricky to execute, and doubly pleasurable to watch.
All of the film’s action—and there’s so much of it, and all of it revels in the joy of creation, of performance, of human invention that seeks a cosmic splendor—eventually concentrates on the banal and yet all-consuming question, “What is the meaning of life?” Of course, the movie doesn’t put the inquiry so plainly. Here it takes the form of the statement, articulated like a plea: “I don’t understand the play.” Followed by the heartbreaking query, “Am I doing it right?”
“Asteroid City” portrays a gorgeous gallery of people in various guises, performing art and performing life, all trying to do it right. It’s a sui generis contraption that nevertheless has its heart in the modern classics—I felt echoes of “Our Town” and “Citizen Kane” and such throughout. But most clearly, by the end, I heard the voice of a different master. Recommending the film to an old friend, I told him that “Asteroid City” was comparable to another great cinematic celebration/interrogation of performance as life, life as performance: Jean Renoir’s “The Golden Coach.” Yeah, it’s that good.
Now playing in select theaters and available nationwide on June 23rd.