Asteroid City is a masterful puzzle — and likely to be Wes Anderson fans' most hated movie

The recently deceased, overwhelmingly successful and famously reclusive Cormac McCarthy is a better comparison to Wes Anderson than you'd think. 

First off, if you play a little fast and loose with the numbers, their most recent releases came about at roughly the same stage in their career. Stella Maris, McCarthy's 2022 book, was technically his twelfth, though it's a companion to The Passenger, released just a month before.

It took that long (let's call it his 11th book) for McCarthy to switch up his game, for the first time leaving behind his rugged male protagonists for a woman, and trading his southern gothic theme for a midwest tale of quantum theory and philosophy.

The second is that McCarthy, like Anderson, is in the vanishingly small club of artists allowed to care less about what they say than how they say it. 

In McCarthy's case that was shown through sparse punctuation, run-on sentences and a dark, almost biblical manner of speaking that allowed him to craft a powerfully unique aesthetic atmosphere instantly recognizable as his own. I mean, who else can get away with the sentence "a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning"?

Anderson's playing the same game — if in a different medium, and from the opposite emotional spectrum. That immediately identifiable style (symmetrical, colour-specific, nostalgic for time frames so purposefully jumbled together they don't seem to exist) and tone is so identifiable it's become a meme — something he himself, by all accounts, despises. 

And while the vast majority of other artists have realism, clarity and economy of words hammered into them by critics and overzealous English teachers, McCarthy and Anderson are given a pass to turn their artifice into an art form all on its own. From the subtle pinks of The Grand Budapest Hotel's walls to the inexplicable but beautiful painted backgrounds of Moonrise Kingdom, no one asks Anderson to colour within the lines. His whimsical pseudo fairy-tales are attractive because they so often cover them up, use the everyday in absurd ways that feels closer to play and make-believe than most adults get to experience. 

Enter Asteroid City.

The director's newest movie is deceptively simple, and more difficult than any of his others to define. On its simplest level, it's about the recently widowed war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) on a road trip with his four children — including one son (Jake Ryan) smart enough to earn the nickname "Brainiac." He's quickly dropped off at camp for genius kids in the titular Asteroid City, where the basic events of the story play out. 

One step below that, the movie's events are actually a play written by solitary genius Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and directed by passionate but irascible Schubert Green (Adrian Brody). And below that, the creation of that play is being documented in a WXYZ-TV broadcast led by "The Host" (Bryan Cranston), guiding us through all the neuroticisms and crises of confidence at the centre of every creative addicted to an audience. 

It's a nested meta-narrative à la House of Leaves, an ouroboros of a story that asks more from its watchers than anything Anderson has put out before. And, like McCarthy, his eleventh movie takes risks he hasn't before, while hiding a puzzle in its centre you're forced to unlock to find the enjoyment. But that's all as the Andersonian touches — a stop-motion roadrunner; girl witches with the names Andromeda, Pandora and Cassiopeia performing spells in the dust; and one of the most delightfully absurd deus ex machinas of all time (you'll know it when you see it) — keep you aware this is indeed an Anderson production. 

The puzzle, though, is the point. Because while it might seem the plot is just a shallow, zany, brightly coloured excuse to set Alex Colville paintings in a desert, Asteroid City (both Anderson's actual movie, and the play within it) are a mournful meditation on art, art-making and purpose. 

Like Spielberg's The Fabelmans, Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood and even Scorsese's subtly self-referential examination of mortality The Irishman, Asteroid City is a late-career masterpiece by a director grappling with the ultimate meaning of their success. 

Though it takes a bit of doing to find, the hints are there. Virtually everyone here is deeply talented, though shockingly unable to believe it: Scarlett Johannsson's Midge Campbell is a famed actor so deeply concerned with how believable her suicide scene looks she recreates it, spilled pills and all, for Augie to judge — a scene to be performed in the aptly titled play The Death of a Narcissist. 

At another point, child genius Woodrow is hellbent on a mission that involves displaying messages on the moon, and talking it over with Tilda Swinton's Dr. Hickenlooper.

"This is a chance to actually be worthwhile in our lifetimes!" goes the argument.

"It's all worthwhile," is the response. "Your curiosity is your greatest asset. Trust it."

Augie meanwhile, is a renowned war photographer so committed he took a load of shrapnel to the back of his head, but too timid to oppose his father-in-law (Tom Hanks) or tell his kids about their mother's death three weeks back. 

And on the meta level, his character leaves the play to talk about how he doubts himself, and his performance. Finding director Schubert Green, they have a conversation that does more to unlock the message than nearly anything else.

"I still don't understand the play," says Augie.

"That doesn't matter," responds Green. "Just keep on telling the story."

That is hard to read as anything other than a message from Anderson to himself. As an artist so buried under accolades and recognition that his style has become a shallow, imitated TikTok gimmick branded with his name, it is almost impossible to produce something that measures up. While that message has more relevance to any other generationally defining talents, it can be useful for any artist struggling with their own meaning: how can we be sure anything we create is worth creating? If I need approval, is any art actually pure?

Anderson's answer is an unequivocal yes, buried beneath layers of story that feel more mournful than anything in his catalogue. And for that reason, it's likely to be many Wes Anderson fans' least favourite Wes Anderson movie — it's already tracking to be his most poorly reviewed film on most critic aggregate sites.

And that's a shame, as Anderson turning the camera back on himself gives us an artistic rumination with depth and unlikely hope beyond anything we've seen before. And he does it all in the spirit of that vanishingly small club: those who care, as short-story author Amy Hempel once said, more about the "acoustics of a sentence" than what it says. 

But even with the aesthetics, Asteroid City has a lot to say — if you feel like deciphering it.