Asteroid City Review
★★★☆☆ On ferociously fastidious form, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City is a visual treat, but its distracted story stops it from truly breaking orbit.
Stories within stories within stories? Check. Deliberately monotonous dialogue? Check. Camera work that feels like someone checking a compass? Check. A sense of whimsy with barely suppressed melodrama? Yep. Stop motion animation? Of course. Bill Murray? Actually, no, not this time, he got COVID and had to pull out. Sadface with a single tear.
If you didn’t know by now, Wes Anderson makes a very specific kind of movie. Asteroid City, the latest in the Texan auteur’s line of pristine and hyper-stylised features, is pretty much guaranteed to delight his adoring fans. Anyone not into films that could potentially double as a fabergé egg need not apply here.
In true Andersonian fashion, Asteroid City revels in the playful puzzle of its deceptively deep narrative. The film opens with Bryan Cranston’s old-timey television presenter introducing the unfolding events as a documentary about a play about a group of junior stargazers and their families, all converging on the titular location for a convention. Interspersed throughout are a series of black and white vignettes, revealing the origins of the play and tales of its creator and company of actors.
To the surprise of no one, Asteroid City looks incredible, surely a lock-in for next year’s awards season. Its handcrafted production bears all the hallmarks of what we’ve come to expect from Anderson visually, but praise also needs to be assigned to Adam Stockhausen, the man chiefly responsible for this brand of peculiar brilliance. Stockhausen has worked with Anderson since 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, each film since optimising its diorama-like presentation. This feels like a full and final realisation, the furthest this art form can possibly go. I guess we’ll see about that.
Its main story is presented with highly saturated colours and a widescreen aspect ratio, Anderson’s trademark dry line delivery pairing perfectly with the arid but very false feeling desert setting. The film is strongest here by far, Jason Schwartzman’s quietly grieving widower leading a large ensemble of colourful characters telling familiar (but not tired) stories of young love, complicated families, teachers and mentors, life and death, and grief and acceptance. A lot of it works. Fans of sci-fi, retrofuture and, maybe even westerns, will find this all quite delightful.
The black-and-white metatextual stuff is far less effective, often interrupting the flow of the more enjoyable main narrative with scenes that try to add extra context and weight to the film’s emotional core. There are brief flashes of greatness in these sequences — Hong Chau (The Whale) and Adrien Brody (The Pianist) share an excellently poignant scene — but the majority feels like a pretentious distraction from a story that was already hitting the same beats far more successfully.
Anderson fans will undoubtedly delight in the impact of Asteroid City. For his fans, it’s another treat, showcasing all his best (and perhaps worst) quirks. A highly acquired taste, but well worth checking out for anyone who appreciates movie-making as a very deliberate and loving act of art.
Originally published at michaelkenny.uk
