NOWHERESVILLE

"Asteroid City" and "Maggie Moore(s)."

- ANTHONY LANE

Like pretty much everything about the new Wes Anderson film, "Asteroid City," the title is a joke. Asteroid City is not a city but a dusty town, a stone's throw from the middle of nowhere, with a population of eighty-seven, a luncheonette, and a motel where you can get milk, Martinis, and real estate from vending machines. And what crashed in this remote spot, nearly five thousand years ago, was not an asteroid but a meteorite, the size of a crystal ball. So, who shows up here, in the course of the plot? Apart, that is, from the widower with his late wife's ashes in a Tupperware bowl, the blazing Hollywood star, the eccentric kids and their futuristic inventions (not least a functioning ray gun), the warbling cowboys, and the government agents who plunge everyone into quarantine? Nobody, really. Unless that green glow in the film's trailer turns out to be an alien spaceship, bearing someone, or something, who stops to pose for a picture. But that would be absurd.

The year is 1955, an era when a merry mushroom cloud can billow upward, in the background, signalling the test of an atomic bomb, without causing undue alarm. The widower is Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a pipe-smoking war photographer. He has three little daughters, a precocious son, Woodrow (Jake Ryan), and a car that just broke down. Also staying in Asteroid City is Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a famous actress who reduces lesser mortals to mutterings of awe, and her daughter, Dinah (Grace Edwards). In a neat romantic arrangement, Dinah falls for Woodrow, with whom she shares a penchant for the extraterrestrial, while Augie loses his heart to Midge. Their courtship is largely conducted across the space between two motel cabins; this allows them to be framed in windows, as if they were stuck in their own private movies.