Courtesy of Pop. 87 Productions
Filmmaker Wes Anderson returns at his pastel-laden Wes Anderson-iest with Asteroid City, an achingly beautiful film that either says very little or buries its subtext between so much desert strata it can be hard to unearth.
Presented as a television documentary about the making of a play (and a sort of dreamy best case scenario version of that play), Asteroid City shifts between realities deftly, even funnily, though without a clearcut message or theme (isolation, maybe, or smallness?). Anchoring oneself to its characters feels more challenging than welcoming. After all, if this TV broadcast delving into the workings of a play which is then presented as a film wanted us to connect with anyone, maybe Anderson wouldn’t have begun by professing so emphatically that none of it is real—nor would he go to such great lengths to remind us so often throughout. Anderson stacks the cast with his regulars including Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, Jeffrey Wright, Willem Dafoe and Jeff Goldlbum. But these people represent a fraction of the players on hand, many of whom get lost in the fast-paced shuffle of the minimalist story.
Asteroid City embraces intrigue in its opening minutes wherein its playwright (Edward Norton) describes how he sees the staging for his reportedly popular work of the same name. Someplace in the desert lies Asteroid City, where a group of mid-pubescent scientists have arrived to claim government-funded accolades for their purportedly impressive works in science. We spend time with each of them, and their sprawling families—including the daughter of a movie star played by Scarlett Johansson—though much of our focus lies with the Steenbeck family’s Woodrow (Jake Ryan), whose mother recently died, and his father, Augie (Schwartzman), who develops a connection with the movie star. Antics ensue as the characters speak like Gilmore Girls (read, fast and samey) and the precious pastel color scheme highlights the bitter emptiness of the desert. As Norton says in his first lines, the light is neither hot nor cold—but it is clean.
Plot-wise, however, cleanliness seems an afterthought. We lose track of characters easily (save a strange and very funny school kid from a group marooned in Asteroid City as part of a field trip) and don’t get to know them in the slightest. Even Tom Hanks can’t elicit thrills as the father-in-law to Schwartzman’s widower Augie. Somewhere, in the distance, Margot Robbie stands by, waiting for her handful of lines—here comes Tilda Swinton, a stranger to the American Southwest just like the rest of ‘em.
Anderson-heads will be quick to defend the sparse storytelling, but beautiful or not, it’s frustrating to observe the man who crafted the dense and dark brilliance of Rushmore or the weird fun of Isle of Dogs lean so heavily into style over substance. Ateroid City sure is pretty, though, and fun-ish, too; or at least light-chuckle-funny. It ends with a whimper rather than a bang, though. Odd, that, for a film set outside an atom bomb test range. There are no answers, but looking back it’s hard to say if there were ever really questions, either.
6
+Gorgeous and silly; some fun character moments
-Unsatisfying; ends suddenly
Asteroid City
Directed by Anderson
With Schwartzman, Ryan, Johansson, Norton, Hanks, Brody, Swinton and Wright
Violet Crown, PG-13, 105 min.
