Asteroid City

 

     World UFO Day in Tucson, Arizona. Rick Chatenever photo.

Once upon a time I would have chalked it up to coincidence that last Saturday – the day I chose to escape a 104-degree Tucson afternoon and see Wes Anderson's “Asteroid City” – was World UFO Day. (Yes, there is such a thing. Google it.)

But now I know better. There are no such things as coincidences. Instead there are cosmic/psycho/spiritual connections, just over the horizon of our consciousness, just beyond the ability of our brains to understand.

The same might be said of filmmaker Anderson. I won't pretend to “understand” every hair of his shaggy dog masterpiece of a screenplay. His movies – always wiggy, each new one proclaimed as his best yet – provide brightly colored glimpses into the museum of curiosities and delights inside his imagination.

“Asteroid City's” plot is like nesting dolls: a '50s television show taking us behind the scenes of a New York stage play that tells of an intrepid band of high-IQ science class nerds and their parents attending their annual stargazers' convention at a remote meteor crater in the Arizona desert. 

One cafe, some tourist cabins, one never-completed traffic overpass and no traffic light now mark the spot, standing between the highway and railroad tracks. Welcome to Asteroid City, pop. 87, where one vending machine sells real estate lots, among others offering soda pop and candy bars.

The stargazers' convention is the biggest thing going on in town – the only thing, actually. At least until the alien shows up.

Brian Cranston is the Rod Serling-like host of the telecast. He introduces us to esteemed playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), director Schubert Green (Adrian Brody) and the cast of the play within a movie. Like Cranston, Norton and Brody, most are members of Anderson's resident ensemble: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Liev Schreiber and, of course, Willem Dafoe. First-timer Tom Hanks gets his name above the credits, ensuring the biggest Wes Anderson opening weekend ever. But even more A-listers like Steve Carell, Margot Robbie, Matt Dillon, and the Road Runner are also along for the ride.

You get the sense watching Wes Anderson movies, that they're like parties. All those superstars show up for the fun, members of the same tribe if not family, trusting auteur Anderson – along with longtime co-writer Roman Coppola, cinematographer Robert D. Yoeman, dolly grip Sanjay Sami and all those other names in the final credit crawl – to work their magic and turn it into a movie.

At the center of the plot is the steamy longing that arises between two parents of the stargazers – grieving widower war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Schwartzman) and va-va-voom movie goddess Midge Campbell (Johansson). But that's just one strand woven into the tapestry of characters, eccentric on first meeting, but becoming more and more lovable as the story goes on.

The perfection of the casting and the razor sharpness of the script's deadpan one-liners are mere cogs in the intricate clockwork of Anderson's mind. As good as he is at directing actors, he's an even better at art direction. The visuals, whimsical and astounding, are as wry as any line in the script. This may be the desert, but there's no dust in sight in his Easter egg color palette. Railroad engines pull pastel cars loaded with grapefruit and shiny new automobiles and atomic missiles. A cop car chasing a criminal speeds down the highway.

In the surreal desert landscape (actually filmed in Spain), every picture tells a story. Signs and billboards along the two-lane blacktop are part of the script. You know there's more sly wit going on in each frame than your eye and brain can process. It all pulses to a brilliantly curated collection of cowboy songs, 45-rpm jukebox hits and “Close Encounters” themes, barely noticeable on the soundtrack.

Besides the alien and the two wounded souls at the center of the story, there are plenty more subplots of loss, longing and occasional triumph among the weird ducks in the cast. In its own whimsical way, it's all about love – not just lovers, but parents and kids, or love of knowledge, or just the indelible love of life itself.

Past Wes Anderson films felt like they wanted to be warm and fuzzy but had to settle for being witty and brilliant instead. This one is a breakthrough. You feel it with your senses rather than grasp it with your mind. You don't understand “Asteroid City” – instead, you just get it.

Maybe it stems from having been the same age of the kids in the cast in the '50s, dressing in the same shorts and plaid shirts, growing up in a hot flat, landscape that produces this sensation of familiarity.

But I think it's something else. While Anderson's previous films felt like visits to his glorious imagination, this one feels more like an act of sharing. Instead of a visit, he has built a world for us to live in, as welcoming as it is wacky, a place we hate to leave as we exit the theater.

“Asteroid City” is billed as science fiction, but Wes Anderson is a superhero unlike any in the Marvel Universe. He is instead a keeper of the flame of Once Upon a Time, when pure imagination was the best special effect of all.