Amid his grief, the oldest of those three children, named Woodrow (played by Jake Ryan), falls in love with a movie star’s (Scarlett Johansson) sardonic daughter Dinah (played by Grace Edwards). In the quaint little town of Asteroid City, Schwartzman’s stoically indifferent character (a war photographer named Augie) informs his three children that their mother has just died and does so with the bedside manner of a scalpel.

Without going into painstaking detail, the movie looks at two universes (you can stop reading here if you want to avoid spoilers): the universe of a playwright writing a play, and the Western frontier town (named “Asteroid City”) where the script's setting takes place. There are also some A-listers making their Anderson debut in this film, including Margot Robbie and Tom Hanks. This time around, Asteroid City has a who’s-who of frequent Anderson collaborators: Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman and Edward Norton, just to name a few.

Anderson’s films, which are defined by their twee storytelling and distinctively vivacious cinematography, frequently boast ensemble casts, commonly including Bill Murray, Luke and Owen Wilson, Frances McDormand and other recurring cast members. Turner contended that Americans are a frontier people who are constantly exploring the unknown, but in Wes Anderson's latest movie, Asteroid City, the director reminds us that we are human beings, first and foremost.Īsteroid City is the 11th film from Anderson, the famed Texas auteur/director whose prior works include The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore and The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” just as it did when Judy Garland said, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” What started as a thinly veiled apologia for colonialism spoke to this notion of what it meant to be American.

This conception of the American frontier, called “the Frontier thesis,” was delivered at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, and in the years since, a mythology and trope of the frontier and the “Wild West” followed and defined the 20th century. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner posited that the core of America’s identity comes from an insatiable urge to explore a new frontier.

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