THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS.
by Jarrod Jones. The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson’s third film and arguably the first to fully unleash the director’s meticulous eye for vintage detail, was a sad movie that was also hilarious. Asteroid City, the 54-year-old filmmaker’s 11th film, despite its sun-soaked grandeur, is gloomier. It couches themes of cosmic isolation and existential doom in grief and artistic frustration — and, yes, vivid vintage finery. When it isn’t busy navel-gazing, it winks at us and nudges our ribs with metatextual humor that the film wears a bit too snugly. The most serenely funny bit of the movie for me was watching a squirrely road runner beep its tiny way across the single stretch of road that runs through this tiny Nowheresville, USA.
There are other jokes, some of which gracefully land buoyed by the acerbic wit one expects from Wes Anderson films, while others — far too many others — thud on the dusty earth of Asteroid City like, I don’t know, the film’s semantically-flawed-but-no-less-eponymous meteorite which now finds itself a tourist attraction for the small one-horse town built around it. It isn’t as funny as Tenenbaums, and maybe it doesn’t want to be; Anderson’s new film grapples with grief in the way Anderson is artistically inclined to these days — colorfully, artfully, and deliberately.
I miss Owen Wilson, who used to co-write screenplays with Anderson and lent these films a sense of indelicate humanity that Anderson now seems disinterested in. As for Anderson, it sure seems like he’s directing his actors to be more inscrutable than ever; gone are the raw, flawed anti-heroes like Gene Hackman’s Royal Tenenbaum or Jason Schwartzman’s Max Fischer of Rushmore. Schwartzman also stars in Asteroid City, but the actor jettisons his misanthropic neuroses for just neuroses. He plays Augie Steenbeck, a war photographer whose wife (Margot Robbie) died three weeks before the opening title card of this film and who has not yet revealed this information to his four children. Why has Augie kept such a secret from his kids? More, how did he keep it?
Augie and his family, attended by a conspicuously sealed Tupperware bowl, visit Asteroid City (pop. 83) to attend the Junior Stargazer convention where Augie’s son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) wins a ribbon for concocting some damn thing that projects logos on the moon. Another ribbon winner makes a death ray. Their road trip isn’t supposed to end there, but it has, thanks to their automobile going kablooey under curious circumstances. (The local mechanic, played by Matt Dillon, seems troubled by their situation.) This keeps Augie, Woodrow, and his three little daughters (played by real-life sisters Ella, Gracie, and Willan Faris, who get up to strange toil and trouble) from visiting their grandfather. Because Wes Anderson attracts impressive names even for minor roles, Grandpa is played by Tom Hanks.
The Junior Stargazers convention has brought other characters to Asteroid City. There’s Dinah Campbell (Grace Edwards), another ribbon-winner accompanied by her forlorn movie star mother, Midge (Scarlett Johansson), who forms a strangely distant romantic connection to Augie; they trade yearnings and the occasional racy Kodak moment from their mutually facing windows. Liev Schreiber sips martinis when he isn’t otherwise philosophically aggrieved by his daredevil son. Steve Park also has a son, played by Ethan Josh Lee, whose anti-authoritarian beliefs soon chafe Jeffrey Wright’s General character. (He’s there to host the Stargazers event for the year and soon after takes on a more amusing role.) Hope Davis is also — well, actually, I’m not entirely sure why Hope Davis is here. To fill out the film’s already stacked cast list, no doubt. Also: hello, Steve Carell.
There’s an alien who swings by Asteroid City, too. Did I mention that? It’s a bug-eyed, nervous thing given life by puppetry and an actor I won’t spoil for you. The alien’s sudden appearance during a night-time star viewing for this shanty community causes a panic, and soon the military swoops in to enforce a mandatory, COVID-tinged quarantine. (Anderson admits our pandemic troubles influenced this story beat.) Once living conditions tighten, Maya Hawke’s schoolteacher begins to cast intrigued eyes at Rupert Friend, who plays a compelling Gene Autry-style singing cowboy. (I mean, who wouldn’t?) When the movie isn’t juggling all this comic giddiness, it breaks its story (and aspect ratio) into a narrower nether-reality where Edward Norton, Bryan Cranston, Adrien Brody, and Willem Dafoe, among other notable faces, dwell among the film’s duller thematic aspirations.
When Anderson’s cast mixes it up under the blazing Spanish sun (the film is set in the American southwest; Anderson shot it in Madrid), Asteroid City finds its comic life. The screenplay, based on a story co-written by Roman Coppola, has a structure that’s too finely calibrated to let more than one or two true moments of joy wander into Anderson’s ginormous desert diorama. Its brief flirtations with goofball serendipity come from the herky-jerky movement of the alien and that road runner. Then there’s its doomy display of animated atomic blasts, which punctuate the film’s deterministic three-act structure. I found myself grinning like a loon when Friend tossed his cowboy hat into the sky and had an impromptu dance with Hawke. But those moments are in the minority.
Asteroid City is possibly Wes Anderson’s fussiest film to date. Gee whiz, how the heck do we quantify that? Well, if there’s one metric for how we might measure Anderson’s restlessness as an artist, I suggest counting the number of times his camera whips on its axis to find the next listless face to stare directly into it. (It’s more than usual.)
There are other Wes Anderson hallmarks. His players are corralled into those indelibly-his symmetrical shots, for instance. Ditto his many academic shout-outs. But the only moments of directorial innovation I could spot — beyond his finessed shooting choreography, which continues to dazzle the eyes — was how he flexes his newfound meta muscles. Sometimes you’re meant to spot the marks he wants his actors to hit on the floor beneath them because, more than a film, Asteroid City is a play, and it ponders quite a lot of things but mostly it’s concerned with making art while pesky things like loss and grief bombard our awesome artist’s brain. As his film’s cosmic ambitions fly off to the stars, with no room left for it among its several formal twists, you get the feeling Anderson prefers to assemble with the thoughts we have when we’re alone and afraid — carefully, artfully, and deliberately — rather than confront them directly.
7 out of 10
Asteroid City hits wide release this Friday.
Written and directed by Wes Anderson.
From a story by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola.
Cinematography by Robert Yeoman.
Starring Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan, and Jeff Goldblum.
Produced by Wes Anderson, Steven Rales, and Jeremy Dawson.
Rated PG-13 for one fleeting shot of full frontal nudity.
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