Everyone knows that movies aren’t real. (It’s kind of the point.) Sets are meticulously designed, costumes are curated by professional stylists, and lines are read by trained actors. Every aspect, from lighting to hair to accents, is carefully directed. Yet most mainstream movies still try to make the audience forget that everything they’ll see for the next two or so hours has another life offscreen. Then there’s Wes Anderson. No one is more aware of (and upfront about) the fact that a movie is produced in its every detail than Anderson (except for maybe someone who watches all of his movies). Every scene looks like it’s made out of cardboard cutouts; every detail is chosen for its precise whimsicality. Indeed, his style is so whimsical that it has inspired social media accounts, coffee table picture books, and postcards of “Accidentally Wes Anderson” buildings across the world.

Anderson’s latest offering, Asteroid City, is still characteristic of the director’s style, but it’s somehow even more self-aware than The French Dispatch or even The Grand Budapest Hotel. The film opens with a black-and-white broadcast about a playwright who is writing a play titled “Asteroid City.” Throughout the movie, scenes switch between this black-and-white broadcast, where we learn about actors’ careers and the director’s tumultuous personal life, and scenes in Anderson’s usual cheerful colors that depict a dress rehearsal of the play itself. “Asteroid City” is about genius kids and their parents at an astronomy convention in 1955 in the titular tiny town in Arizona. The play centers on a recently widowed father, his flirtations with a famous actress, and his children, who are participating in the convention. While this cast of characters is there, a spaceship pauses over the convention, an alien briefly descends, and the little town is put on lockdown by the government.

There is a fun contrast, stylistically and tonally, between the two stories. The broadcast has an almost eerie feel, serious and adult, while the play itself is playful and bright. Asteroid City always feels a little contrived, and with its propped-up set and switches between the play and broadcast, Anderson seems to be commenting on his own artifice. There’s a void in Asteroid City that he seems to feel his usual careful ordering can’t fill. While manufactured sets and irony point characters and plot in specific directions, the characters’ responses don’t necessarily provide them with emotional or metaphysical answers to their most pressing questions: How can life possibly go on when your wife has just died? What’s a little girl to do when handed her mother’s ashes but try to do some magic to bring her back? When a spooky being comes down from the cosmos, how could Earth ever be the same?

While the play “Asteroid City” within the movie Asteroid City juxtaposes these unanswerable questions with the quantifiable scientific discoveries those at the convention tout and with the order the military tries to impose, the broadcast leans into these tensions, too. In one scene toward the end, one actor in the play retreats from the stage into the broadcast side of the film to ask the director a question. The role of the grieving husband and father hurts him, he explains, and he still doesn’t know what the play is about. He wants to know if it’s okay that it pains him—and he wants to know so badly that he interrupts the whole rehearsal happening around him to ask.

The characters of Asteroid City (both movie and play) have the sense that life can’t possibly go on after they are dealt a tremendous loss or the discovery of extraterrestrial life. These events seem to call for some kind of cataclysmic change. While the government in the play tries to explain away the aliens and a grandfather tries to explain death to his grandchildren, Anderson’s very Anderson-ness shows that this man-made orderliness is incontrovertibly obliterated by the unexpected. These interruptions to the world they inhabit leave his characters grasping for certainty, even as they try to continue living as if life were normal. But as Anderson demonstrates, the future will always be unpredictable, even (or perhaps especially) in a world attentively created by imaginative playwrights and set designers. 

In the end, Asteroid City does offer one answer to this conundrum: When the actor can’t understand the pain his character endures, or why it causes him pain to perform it, he is told by another suffering man to accept that suffering and that uncertainty as a mystery, as a gift. The stilted, obviously artificial setting doesn’t prevent the acceptance of suffering. After all, life does go on; or, to put it another way, “all the world’s a stage.” When the unexpected comes—when everything around us seems to be mechanized by an unseen hand that works outside of the field of our understanding and control—then perhaps we must conclude that this inbreaking of the unknowable is normal life. And when the curtain falls and the director steps away, what we do with that conclusion, and that life, will be up to us.