Asteroid City

Asteroid City

Wes Anderson’s 1998 second feature, “Rushmore,” follows Max Fischer, a self-important yet perpetually besieged high school student. He has many claims to fame, including writing a hit play. An academic disaster and indefatigable “yes” man, Fischer is enacting an adolescence that would protect him from having to deal with its difficult parts among them, the ache of losing his mother.

I don’t need to tell you that Wes Anderson’s movies are highly stylized, nor do I need to tell you that many critics of his work have said that his stylization comes at the expense of emotional credibility and that “Rushmore,” released three decades ago this year, represents his most successful balancing act of visual design and genuine poignance. It’s a matter of taste. The lively tidiness of Anderson’s frames has never alienated me in the way it does some people.

And as far as I’m concerned, “Asteroid City,” his latest collaboration with cinematographer Robert Yeoman, may be the most incandescently beautiful and certainly one of the most powerfully emotional! things they’ve ever done together. Imagine a butterfly landing on your heart; now imagine it squeezing your heart with little pincers you didn’t even know it had.

“Asteroid City” centers on fictional playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), who has written we learn not just one hit play but more than one.

The film opens in lustrous black and white and Academy ratio squareness: It takes the form of a TV documentary made around 1955 in America. Before watching it, my wife and I were talking about what I might see at this screening; given the last few Wes Anderson joints (“Isle of Dogs,” “The French Dispatch”), we wondered aloud: Voice-over or no voice-over?

Answer: Both! The pseudo-doc is narrated by Bryan Cranston, who, dressed in a natty suit and tie, tells the story of the theatrical production “Asteroid City,” a Carter Earp (Conrad’s brother) play, which is presented here by Anderson & Co. with wait for it! color and widescreen and cinematic brio.

If it already sounds difficult to follow, good because it isn’t. Anderson’s latest is both the most ingeniously put together and the breeziest in terms of watching one multi-narrative anthology nested inside another. Earp’s play is set at a remote Western meteor crash site that’s hosting some sort of Space Camp; like all of Anderson’s movies, it’s beautiful geographically/geologically (the desert orange against cloudless blue is like eating a Creamsicle on a sunny day) as well as architecturally (every setting is perfect down to the typeface on the diner front and the vending machines).

This small not-quite-town Space Camp is hosting several scholastically gifted teens whose futuristic inventions one of them literally a disintegration ray are going to be stolen by the U.S. government (presenting its most benign face via General Gibson [Jeffrey Wright]). The brilliant kids all have their own drama: Woodrow (Jake Ryan) is the oldest son of war photographer Augie Steenback (Jason Schwartzman), who still hasn’t told him or his three young daughters that their mother died three weeks ago, right around the time this scholarship competition began.

Midge Campbell’s (Scarlett Johansson) daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards) immediately gets along with Woodrow, whom she nicknames “Brainiac” Midge being herself an actress whose commitment to her craft is matched only by her free-floating sadness. Other Stargazers have other issues Ricky Cho has a healthy skepticism of authority; Clifford Kellogg has an unquenchable thirst for adults daring him to pull ill-advised stunts.

The way in which Anderson can pack characters and their odd traits into a narrative that never flags once (the movie fizzes and buzzes through every second of its 105-minute running time) is remarkable. And then, after Portman leaves Fraser alone in the desert, the movie becomes something else entirely for its last 40 minutes.

In this case, it takes the form of an announcement that sounds like a plea: “I don’t understand the play.” Followed by the shattering question, “Am I doing it right?”

“Asteroid City” is about a beautiful collection of people in different costumes, doing art and doing life, all trying to do it right. It’s a one of a kind machine that still has its feet in the modern classics. I kept getting whiffs of “Our Town” and “Citizen Kane” and such throughout. But most directly, towards the end I heard another master’s voice. When I recommended the film to an old friend, I said that “Asteroid City” was equal to another great movie celebration/interrogation of performance as life, life as performance: Jean Renoir’s “The Golden Coach.” Yeah, it’s that good.

Watch Asteroid City For Free On Gomovies.