Wes Anderson’s latest mirage, “Asteroid City,” carries a lighter and literally sunnier spirit than usual for this filmmaker, whose sense of whimsy can sometimes curdle into, well, a bit of a load. Shooting in Spain, creating a drolly imagined Eisenhower-era desert town out of both practical and digital design elements, the big-sky, open-air setting of “Asteroid City” does something to Anderson’s fiercely hermetic and controlled aesthetic. Coming off the suffocating elaborations of his previous picture, “The French Dispatch,” this movie amounts to a similar risk with greater rewards.
Director Anderson and his frequent co-writer Roman Coppola set their tale(s) in 1955. In black-and-white, and a boxy aspect ratio, we’re presented first with a “Playhouse 90″-type TV program, hosted by Bryan Cranston in Rod Serlingesque tones. Tonight’s play, he tells us, is “Asteroid City,” in his words “an imaginary drama created expressly for this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication — but together they present an authentic account of the inner workings of a modern theatrical production.”
So: It’s a play, written by a Wyoming-bred variation on Tennessee Williams or William Inge, played by Edward Norton. It’s also the story of the people staging this televised world premiere, under the creative sway of Actors Studio-style methods of psychological exploration and performance techniques. Adrien Brody plays the director. Jason Schwartzman plays the leading actor, insecure about his progress in the role; Scarlett Johansson plays the nominal female lead. (Anderson movies never quite do well enough by the women on-screen.)
