"Asteroid City" boasts Wes Anderson's most stacked cast yet. Frequent collaborators Jason Schwartzman, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton, Jeffrey Wright, Jeff Goldblum, and Tony Revolori are all back, joined by first-time Anderson cast members Tom Hanks, Steve Carrell, Scarlett Johansson, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, and Hope Davis. The writer-director and all those actors have a lot to say about the entertainment industry, the creative process, and their craft.
Schwartzman's actor character, Jones Hall, seems to be loosely based on Marlon Brando and James Dean, famed pupils of the Stanislavski System, sometimes referred to as method acting. Dafoe's Saltzburg Keitel is a Lee Strasberg-type. Strasberg was an influential acting teacher who expanded upon Stanislavski's method under whom Brando, James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe studied. Both of Johansson's characters are modeled after Monroe, who, like Midge, had multiple husbands, endured cruel treatment by some of the men in her life, and whose talents (especially for comedy) went under-appreciated in her lifetime. Midge's grease paint black eyes harken back to this sad fact.
Norton's Conrad Earp isn't a Wes Anderson one-for-one, nor is Brody's Schubert Green, but the auteur is still speaking through both characters about his own experiences as a storyteller. Earp is a Tennessee Williams dupe, while Green is more like if Stanley Kowalski played Elia Kazan. "Asteroid City" simultaneously celebrates the rich history of and pokes fun at the pretentiousness of 20th-century American theater and film. In an even more meta way, it does the same to Anderson's own body of work.
