Asteroid City

   As the end-credit song reminds us, “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.” Wes Anderson’s extravagant confection enacts the variety of dream-lives that buffer — yet illuminate — our “real” life.

The film is a nesting doll of performed fictions. The film we’ve gone to a theatre to see — so far — opens on a small-screen black and white TV image where the host (Brian Cranston) introduces playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) at work. He appears in a small box far away in the small screen. That’s two levels already. His surname evokes yet another, the mythopoeic frontier lawman of the everything’s OK corral. 

A fourth is the stage presentation of that ostensible play, which itself moves from the stage to the backstage, inner-level of presentation. Then the three-act play is itself presented as a reel-life performance in the eponymous small desert town near the atom bomb testing site.

On that level, the preternatural bright colours and stylized action add yet another context: the animated cartoon. The “real” dramatization is heightened into blatant artifice. As if to confirm this context, an actual roadrunner appears briefly in the action and at length in the foreground of the last shot. The “meep meep” is implicit.

That layering of dramatic production embodies our dependence upon fantasies to guide us, especially in a world more than ever shadowed by the elaboration of that atomic threat. The periodic boom and mushroom clouds leave the citizens shaken but not stirred. As thematic luck would have it, among the trailers preceding this screening was that of the more historic reminder of the birth of the atomic threat, Oppenheimer.

Against the cataclysmic paranoia of The Bomb, the film craves community spirit. So Montana defends the alien who briefly reclaims the asteroid that gave the set city its name: “I reckon that alien didn't mean no harm. No, he ain't American. No, he ain't a creature of God's Earth, but he's a creature of somewhere.”

And aren’t we all? Indeed all the film’s characters are creatures of a somewhere not quite real but an entrance towards it. Actress Midge and widower Zack move from separate boxed frames into a passionate refuge from their respective tragedies. Zack’s antagonistic father-in-law learns a lesson in humanity and respect from Zack’s young triplet daughters, their mom transported in Tupperware.

With all this fictional layering we often miss the identities in the most star-studded cast since Altman’s The Player. The likes of Cranston and Norton, Scarlet Johansen, Liev Schreiber, Tom Hanks, slip by virtually unrecognizable. Conversely, Jason Schwartzman appears usually in his bearded role as recently widowed father, then as the clean-chinned actor. This becomes another kind of layering, of the stretch between the real and the fantasy.    

All these layers of performance draw us through the director’s fantasy to remind us of the debt we, the debt that our science, the debt that our governments, owe — to humanity, not to their own advantage. A timely and tragic reminder, that really should wake us up but….