During an introductory speech for the event, he recounts the high points of his life.
The actors in Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” took the director’s deadpan style to its flattest limits. But under a stoic exterior, Jeffrey Wright, who plays General Grif Gibson, the top U.S. military representative at a kind of science fair known as Asteroid Day, burns with joyful and poetic fire. During an introductory speech for the event, he recounts the high points of his life. “Chapter 3,” he says, “another war. Arms and legs blown off like popcorn. Eyeballs gouged out, figuratively and literally. The men put on shows under the palm fronds dressed as women in hula skirts. That was life.” It’s funny, and sad, and madly evocative—scenes from the war movie that Anderson has yet to make.