Formerly Known As Cinema

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Scarlett Johansson is the best thing about the new Wes Anderson film, “Asteroid City”.

With her warm, open smile and comforting poise, Johansson brings a reliable center of authenticity to this rather tall tale of atom bombs and aliens in the low desert of Arizona, circa 1955.

Though director Anderson informs us right up front that what we’re watching is a mere contrivance — a movie adaptation of a TV adaptation of a stage play, or some variation therein — Johansson, unlike the rest of the very talented cast, invests a level of genuine feeling and visceral corporeality to the proceedings, a quality not usually found in Anderson’s often brilliant but willfully artificial confections.

As Midge Campbell, a charismatic but melancholy movie star, Johansson gives a performance of breathtaking emotional availability. She’s always been a watchable screen presence, if perhaps a bit untethered, even amorphous at times.

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But from the moment she walks onscreen, Midge Campbell becomes the movie’s absolute center, her every line, gesture and look conveying with a plaintive yet valiant honesty everything we need to know about the loves, losses and dreams of her character.

Like a modern day version of Mary Astor or Deborah Kerr, Johansson imparts a wondrous, indefinable magnetism that acts on the nervous system like the first sip of a cocktail. And “Asteroid City” suffers every time she leaves.

It’s hard to pin down at first what the actual story is since we’re almost immediately removed from the initial image of Bryan Cranston (”Breaking Bad”) as a 50’s TV anthology host and shown — through a series of clever feints and misdirects — the ever-widening framework surrounding the various layers of narrative embroidery on offer.

It seems we’re back — yet again — in the exhausting and inexplicable contemporary fetish for the charmless construct of the 'multiverse’, where one world just isn’t enough anymore: Now we must have every nesting doll in the stack talking at us simultaneously.

And this firing-squad approach, which is purportedly there to give richness and backstory and layers of crisscrossed resonance to the tale, rarely does more than needlessly irritate and exhaust our already overstimulated receptors with the visual equivalent of busy work.

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And sadly, after all the tedious labor of sussing out the umpteen threads, we invariably discover at the core not some deep complexity to ponder on, but rather a disappointing vacancy that hardly seems worth the effort.

Yet, it’s understandable that Anderson would gravitate towards this multilayered Napoleon pastry of a film. Like an overstuffed dessert case crammed with an infinite selection of artificially flavored bonbons, “Asteroid City” provides him — and by extension his audience — with a stunning canvas on which to realize his endlessly inventive production design fantasies, while simultaneously demonstrating his twee, whimsical, and rather tangential grasp of human feeling while indulging in an overall sense of utter weightlessness.

He’s like the cinematic version of French composer Erik Satie’s diaphanous piano music — most famously the Gymnopédie No. 1, which Anderson used prominently in 2001’s “The Royal Tannenbaums” — art so breezy and charming and opaque that it’s almost better off as background music.

Take any five minutes of “Asteroid City” and you’ll find much to delight the eye and ear: Adam Stockhausen’s flawlessly rendered ersatz desert setting is a masterpiece of production design; Alexander Desplait’s pointillistic soundtrack and the immaculately curated playlist of skiffle tunes from the likes of Mid-Century pop stars Nancy Whiskey and Johnny Duncan make for a thoroughly pleasant aural experience.

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And yet even my voracious sweet tooth couldn’t handle 105 minutes of being spoon fed all that candy. Without depth, breadth or gravity, “Asteroid City” is ultimately a high-calorie binge that left me feeling gassy, bloated and yet still hungry.

Still. The first third — before Anderson runs out of steam and starts repeating himself — does provide a diverting, whimsical entree into his airless but undeniably stunning universe.

Switching from stark black and white to a deeply saturated color palette of pink, turquoise and rust, the story of a playwright — and his weird play about brilliant children, a movie star and some really poorly designed aliens — initially intrigues.

And while Anderson is still pulling the toys out of his storytelling trunk, our attention is riveted. There’s humor, inventiveness and the hope that all these elements will gel into something meaningful.

But at around the hour mark the tone of blank-eyed vagary starts to cloy, as the minimal plot — about child inventors being celebrated in the middle of the desert — doubles back on itself and the blithe air of casual nonsense comedy flattens into dullness.

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Some in the vast collection of very talented actors navigate Anderson’s deadpan universe better than other: Jason Schwartzman, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Matt Dillon, Bryan Cranston and especially Hope Davis give smart, effective performances in somewhat insignificant roles.

But others, including Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Margot Robbie, Hong Chau and a particularly out of place Steve Carell either barely register or can’t find the correct note to make their cameos worth their salaries.

All the child actors, however, are magnificent. What could easily have been a group of irritating smart alecks have been directed to perfection.

Grace Edwards — who plays Midge Campbell’s self-aware daughter Dinah — is particularly marvelous. Like a divine combination of Ava Gardner and Kaye Ballard, Edwards brings both sensuality and goofy humor to her role. She is definitely a young actor to watch.

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The Anderson devotees will eat this latest flick up like free pizza. And even the naysayers will find something to enjoy. (That martini vending machine is an undeniably droll piece of designing genius).

Regardless, Scarlet Johansson alone makes this one worth a trip to the big screen. If you’ve ever wanted to see what it looks like when a movie star becomes a supernova, here’s your chance.

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