With his highly stylized visual palette and penchant for deadpan absurdity, Wes Anderson is easily one of the most distinctive American filmmakers working today—at a time when most films are executed with such formulaic blandness that even the hardest-working auteurists find themselves struggling to recall who ostensibly directed them, his efforts are instantly recognizable to most moviegoers. The problem is that over the course of his last couple of films, he has begun to become so consumed with the surface details of his movies—such as the visuals and corralling the massive casts of top actors eager to work on his projects in the same way that they used to line up to appear in the new projects of Robert Altman or Woody Allen—that the narratives that used to be just as striking as the other aspects of his films have begun to feel neglected, as if he was no longer able to tell a complete and satisfying story as he did with the likes of Rushmore, Moonrise Kingdom or The Grand Budapest Hotel. In the case of his last film, The French Dispatch, he was able to get away with this because the conceit of the film—that we were witnessing a series of stories covered in the final issue of a revered literary magazine—meant that he didn’t have to tell one full-length story.
If anyone assumed that Anderson would exercise some kind of course correction after the stylistic excesses and narrative wobbliness of his recent efforts with his latest film, Android City, they will be disabused of that notion within its opening seconds. If anything, he has taken his stylistic excesses to even greater extremes than before—the visuals are bolder and quirkier than ever and the massive cast of A-list actors suggests what might have resulted if The Cannonball Run had been cast by the same people who book the annual New Yorker Festival. The results are still kind of entertaining, I suppose, and I definitely prefers it to most of the CGI laziness blocking up the multiplexes of late. That said, watching it makes one long for the days when Anderson was seemingly more interested in telling interesting stories than in merely pushing his quirky aesthetic to the breaking point and beyond.
The period this time around is the 1950s and the setting is Asteroid City, a tiny desert town that is the home of a crater made by an asteroid long ago and whose focal point appears to be a motel run by a manager (Steve Carell, taking the role that was originally intended for Anderson regular Bill Murray until he came down with COVID-19 just before shooting) that contains a string of oddball vending machines offering everything from snacks to freshly made martinis to land deeds. If that weren’t enough, the motel also turns out to be close enough to nearby atomic testing sites that you almost expect to see the cast from The Conqueror come by in search of rooms. If that had happened, of course, John Wayne and the gang would have been out of luck because, as we soon discover, the motel is about to be filled up with the winners of a junior astronomy convention, along with families, officials and assorted oddballs who have gathered for a convention celebrating the town’s meteor.
Chief among them is Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a war photographer who is still so consumed with grief over the passing of his wife three weeks earlier that he still hasn’t gotten around to telling his four kids, including budding teen astronomer Woodrow (Jake Ryan) what has happened—news that especially appalls his former father-in-law, the rich and imperious Stanley Zack (Tom Hanks), when he calls asking for a ride when his car breaks down as they arrive in town. Then there is famous Hollywood actress Midge (Scarlett Johansson), whose teen daughter, Dinah (Grace Edwards), is also participating in the festivities, leading to awkward flirtations between Augie and Midge as well as Woodrow and Dinah. Others on the scene include a US Army general (Jeffrey Wright), a mysterious scientist (Tilda Swinton), a young schoolteacher (Maya Hawke) who has brought her class on a trip and assorted cowpokes, locals and hangers-on.
Things become more complicated for them when the opening festivities are interrupted by an unexpected visitor—one I will leave for you to discover—who comes out of nowhere and disappears with the meteor, an event that causes the government to put the town and all of its visitors under a quarantine that forces them to come to terms with their various issues while waiting to be allowed to leave. Things are even more complicated for those of us in the audience because, as we have learned right from the start, the story that we are ostensibly watching is actually a Studio One-style television presentation of a play that has been written by famed playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and directed by one Schubert Green (Adrien Brody). The film bounces back and forth between the presentation of Asteroid City, per se, which is depicted in vivid pastel colors, and the behind-the-scenes stuff, which is all done in black-and-white with the show’s unctuous host (Bryan Cranston) as our guide.
I presume that in writing the script, Anderson decided to go with the theatrical framing device as a way of giving viewers a deeper and more nuanced take on the material unfolding before them—instead of just playing a grief-stricken father trying to come to terms with the death of his wife, for example, Schwartzman is really playing a confused actor searching for a way to approach playing a grief-stricken father trying to come to terms with the death of his wife. This is an approach that could, I suppose, have led to some interesting ideas but Anderson doesn’t do much on anything with it—we never see Johansson’s actress trying to navigate the hoops of playing a character who is herself an actress, for example. Instead, it exists, like so much else in the film, like an arch diversion devised by him that ends up interrupting the proceedings way too often and you get the sense that Anderson decided to include it in the mix in the hopes that viewers might not notice that the material involving the denizens of Asteroid City is ultimately even more slender than the vignettes in The French Dispatch.
There is also the sense that Anderson included that frame as a way of cramming even more famous faces into his artfully crafted frames. In addition to the big-name stars that I have already cited, Asteroid City also features appearances from Liev Schreiber and Hope Davis and parents of some of the other astronomy kids, Rupert Friend as a singing cowboy who takes a shine to the teacher played by Hawke, Matt Dillon as a local mechanic, Willem Dafoe as a crazy acting teacher and turns from the likes of Hong Chau, Jeff Goldblum and Margot Robbie that are so brief that it probably took longer to add their names to the poster than it did to film their scenes. Sure, it is fun to see so many famous names turning up in such odd circumstances but Anderson is juggling so many characters here that too many of them get lost in the shuffle and the ones that do make an impression—I especially liked the turns from Hanks as the taciturn father-in-law, Hawke as the cheerfully gawky schoolteacher, Edwards as Midge’s refreshingly straightforward daughter and Carell as the serene observer of the mannered chaos surrounding him—hit harder more because of the sheer force of the personalities playing them than due to the material itself.
And yet, even though Asteroid City is a bit of a disjointed mess at its center, it is still a frequently watchable mess. As always, the technical aspects utilized to bring Anderson’s idiosyncratic vision to life are impeccable—thanks to the contributions of such longtime collaborators as cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman and production designer Adam Stockhausen, the film creates a world that is as strangely inviting as it is patently artificial and which offers repeat viewers plenty of odd bits of business crammed into the frame in the manner of a typically overloaded MAD Magazine panel. There are also a lot of big laughs to be had throughout the film, including a particularly funny running gag about a police pursuit that somehow manages to pass through the town multiple times, like a bizarre form of punctuation throughout. If nothing else, there is always the potentially cheering fact that a film this decidedly weird managed to make it to the screen in the first place—when it eventually takes its place in the Criterion Collection, I am dearly hoping that the extras include a video of Anderson pitching it to the people at Focus because I would love to see what that looked like.
Asteroid City is not terrible by any stretch of the imagination and I would not necessarily want to dissuade anyone with some degree of interest in it from seeing it. However, compared to Anderson’s finest films, which managed to included compelling stories and fascinating character amidst the visual gimcrackery, this one can’t help but come off like somewhat of a hollow technical exercise that feels more like a theme park attraction designed to recreate the experience of a Wes Anderson film for his cast than a project worthy of the talents involved. (If the idea of a massive cast of characters gathered at an offbeat locale over the course of several days for what proves to be a seismic event suggests Anderson’s version of Nashville in theory, the results play more like his Honky Tonk Freeway, sans the water-skiing elephant.) Although the film will certainly not win over any of Anderson’s detractors nor those unfamiliar with his work, his loyal fan base will probably still find enough of value here to make it worth watching. That said, I suspect that when those same fans turn to their Letterboxd pages in order to rank it among his other films, few will be placing it towards the top of their lists.