In Review: 'Asteroid City' and 'No Hard Feelings'

Wes Anderson returns with a star-filled, whimsical puzzle box movie while, elsewhere, Jennifer Lawrence headlines a raunchy / sweet summer comedy.

Asteroid City
Dir. Wes Anderson 
105 min.

Whenever I think about the soul of Wes Anderson’s work, I go back to the moment in Rushmore where the precocious Max Fischer introduces Herman Blume—his friend, benefactor and romantic rival—to his father, who’s a barber. To that point, Max had cultivated an image of himself as the ultimate representative of Rushmore Academy, a school for the elite and presumably wealthy, and now he’s pulling down that veil for Blume. Bill Murray’s silent expression of acknowledgement in that second is lovely and absolutely crucial to the film’s emotional impact. It could also be easily missed. 

There may be no director working whose films are more resonant on repeat viewings than Anderson’s, because these grace notes are so often tucked into the density of his overall design— the vast ensemble casts, the carefully nested narrative architecture, the meticulousness of the framing and color and production design. It can be a rich soufflé, and I immediately felt, after watching Anderson’s new film, Asteroid City, that another round would be necessary. Here’s a film that’s framed as a TV production of a play that’s rendered so persuasively (if strangely) as a movie that you have to remind yourself that the characters and the world you’re experiencing are the invention of another character in the film. And yet, underneath all those layers of artifice are real, authentic feelings, invested by Anderson and experienced by his audience. Anderson leaves it to us to sort it all out. 

Much as Rushmore opened with a proscenium, the film starts in TV-box black-and-white with Bryan Cranston as the Host, talking about the playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and the televised production of his play Asteroid City, directed by Schubert Green (Adrian Brody). Anderson plants that conceit in our minds before moving the action to a desert town of the same name in September 1955, starting with a tour of the Southwestern set—a diner, a single-pump gas station and repair shop, a twelve-bungalow motel, etc.—that’s similar to the introduction of Steve Zissou’s ship in The Life Aquatic. This is all made-up, we can tell ourselves, while considering themes of post-war malaise or the mushroom clouds appearing in the backdrop. But then Anderson’s story—or, sorry, Earp’s—unfolds in that Andersonian locale and our awareness of its artifice fades away. 

Located “halfway between Parched Gulch and Arid Plains,” the town of Asteroid City, population 89, is known mainly for a 100-foot crater and the now-tiny meteor that caused it millennia ago. But the sleepy town gets hopping when a “Junior Stargazer and Space Cadet” convention descends upon it, bringing young intellects like Woodrow (Jake Ryan) to share their enthusiasm for the heavens with others of their kind. Woodrow arrives with his father Augie (Schwartzman) and his three little sisters (a scene-stealing unit, it must be said), but Augie hasn’t yet worked up the nerve to tell his children that their mother passed away a few weeks earlier. Augie and Woodrow meet companionable counterparts in Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a TV actress whose career is slumping, and her daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards), who’s also there to be honored during the convention. Everyone’s plans are upended, however, when an extraterrestrial event leads to a military quarantine and a lot of confusion. 

The who’s-who of recognizable faces in Asteroid City makes it seem like the rest of Hollywood had to be shut down during production: Tom Hanks makes his first appearance for Anderson as Augie’s crusty father, as does Steve Carell as the motel proprietor and Margot Robbie in a bit part that also happens to be a Blume-meeting-Max’s-dad-level moment. Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Maya Hawke, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe and Jeff Goldblum are also present in roles of varying (if mostly minor) significance, but they really submit themselves to Anderson’s larger design. 

And what is that design? It’s not as readily accessible as the zany Matryoshka doll of The Grand Budapest Hotel or the sweet coming-of-age romance at the center of Moonrise Kingdom, though both those aspects are present. Asteroid City is more an invitation to appreciate it from a variety of angles as a melancholic treatment of love and death; as a starry-eyed look at the mysteries of outer space and human connection; as a vibe check of the mid-1950s; or as a commentary on the creative process and the relationship between artists and what they produce. If you can take all that in on first viewing, great. I’m going back for more. — Scott Tobias

No Hard Feelings
Dir. Gene Stupnitsky
103 min.

Last year’s Causeway confirmed Jennifer Lawrence’s gift for understated, internalized performances, a skill that had been in evidence since her star-making turn in 2010’s Winter’s Bone. After that zig, a seeming zag: Lawrence’s latest, which she also produced, is a raunchy comedy with a risqué premise and a willingness to follow that premise to some unexpected places. But beneath the surface is a thoughtful character piece based around an unlikely friendship and set against the backdrop of a class-divided East Coast vacation destination. Sometimes a zag isn’t that big a zag after all. Directed by Gene Stupnitsky (Good Boys) from a screenplay by Stupnitsky and John Phillips, No Hard Feelings doesn’t always know how to reconcile its dramatic and comedic impulses, but the earnestness of its effort goes a long way.

Lawrence plays Maddie Barker, a native of Long Island’s Montauk whose jobs as an Uber driver and a waitress barely allow her to keep up payments on the childhood home she inherited from her mother. When Maddie’s car is repossessed, those payments go from difficult to impossible. But Maddie believes she’s found the solution to her problems when she happens upon an ad placed by a wealthy married couple (Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick) looking for a young woman willing to “date” their shy 19-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) before he heads off to Princeton. (The word “date” is pointedly placed in quotation marks.) Not really seeing any ethical problems with taking the job, and short of other options anyway, Maddie agrees and soon arranges her own meet-cute with Percy by dropping by the animal shelter where he volunteers.

This does not go well, nearly ending in disaster when Percy believes Maddie is kidnapping him. Still, he’s intrigued and they awkwardly begin dating (but never quite “dating”). As the summer progresses, they form a bond rooted in Maddie’s playacting attraction to him that blossoms into a different sort of relationship, albeit one that’s hard to define. Behind Percy’s introversion, Maddie finds a complex guy with a desire to connect with others that he doesn’t always know how to act on. Beneath her devil-may-care attitude, he finds someone with a deep fear of being hurt. But the truth of their arrangement hangs over the friendship at all times.

No Hard Feelings takes something of a grab bag approach, freely mixing moments of raucous comedy with well-observed dramatic moments and sharp observations about gaps between Montauk’s well-to-do visitors and the residents who prepare their food and drive them from place-to-place and call it home all year round. Its tone is wobbly, but the cast helps even it out. A vaguely crafted character—sometimes cripplingly shy, sometimes not—Percy is made believable by Feldman’s sensitive performance. He partners well with Lawrence, too, who’s equally at home in brash comic scenes—too many of which appear in the trailer, though what’s sure to be the most talked-about gag is not trailer-friendly—as in more reflective moments. (There’s an extended take where Maddie listens to a song and silently realizes it could have been written just for her that’s among the best moments in Lawrence’s filmography.) Not every element of No Hard Feelings works or meshes together perfectly, but it’s been far too long since we’ve had a solid summer comedy with more than just cheap laughs on its mind (or, really, any sort of summer comedy of note). This A-for-effort attempt will do. —Keith Phipps