This review of Asteroid City is from the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Expect more about the film as we get closer to the film’s theatrical release in June.
Film lovers have never been in danger of mistaking one Wes Anderson film for the work of another, but it has become increasingly distinctive with age. As both storyteller and visual stylist, Anderson creates highly decorative, deceptively poignant works that are instantly recognizable. It’s also so appealing that it’s spawned fashion trends, photo books, successful Instagram accounts, and a recent wave of AI-generated art Lifestyle TikTok Parodies which provide definitive proof that there is a great distance between artistry and algorithm. But even though its signature seedy visual style has become a ubiquitous part of popular culture, Asteroid City proves there’s still no one quite as good as Wes Anderson.
Anderson has been making great, jubilant, hurtful, and deep films for decades, but has strayed from the naturalistic, heartfelt sensibilities of Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums. As a filmmaker, he has taken it to the next level by focusing on visually opulent flights of fancy. His most recent films — from the Grand Budapest Hotel’s neo-baroque architecture intricately nested with matryoshka dolls to The French Dispatch’s sparkling jeu d’esprit — move away from modernity and into bygone eras, adding an extravagant, disarmingly candid visual richness details.
Asteroid City, his eleventh feature film, is as dazzlingly ambitious as those films in its recreation of the mid-century American Southwest circa 1955. The desert city “Asteroid City” was named after a huge meteor crater and a nearby sky observatory. It’s a tiny outpost of civilization (population 87) set against the sun-scorched countryside and turquoise skies of the surrounding countryside.
Image: Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features
Local attractions include a 12 chair lunch eatery, a gas station with a gas pump, a hotel with 10 motor parking spaces and a phone booth. Mushroom clouds loom in the distance, a somber reminder of the nuclear paranoia of the time. Broken station wagons and an unfinished exit point to the busier development that was once planned for the area. But now most of the traffic — including a government train carrying Pontiacs, pecans, and nuclear warheads — is just passing through.
Asteroid City will not open in this desert city. It begins on a black-and-white studio set, with a Rod Serling-esque host (Breaking Bad actor Bryan Cranston) shaping the entire film as a stage play that was never performed, presented by a troupe of New York stage actors including the Tennessee Williams bordering playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and his leading actors Jones Hall (Jason Schwartzman) and Mercedes Ford (Scarlett Johansson). “Asteroid City doesn’t exist,” says the moderator. “It’s an imaginary drama created specifically for this show. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal invention.”
Establishing the American West and New York’s legendary Actors Studio as corners of mythological Americana hovering just outside the action, Anderson blasts back into the desert with the audacity of a roadrunner screaming through the frame. As the frame segment’s boxy aspect ratio opens up into a stunning widescreen format, the main protagonists – including four teenage scientific prodigies and their families – reunite for the 1955 Junior Stargazer competition, judged by a five-star military general (Jeffrey Wright). becomes ) and a celebrated, distant astronomer (Tilda Swinton, though perhaps that goes without saying).
For Augie Steenbeck (Schwartzman), a war photographer who still mourns the loss of his wife, it’s a challenge to pack his three daughters and mentally ill son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) into a forest-rimmed Mercury Monterey and drive into the desert – mainly because he didn’t tell the children about the death of their mother. “The time is never right,” he says to his father-in-law (Tom Hanks), who replies, “The time is always wrong.”
Photo: Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features
Meanwhile, movie star Midge Campbell (Johansson) rehearses for a new role – one of the “tragic, abused alcoholics” she’s known for – and accompanies her stargazing daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards) to Asteroid City. Midge checks into the cabin across from Augie and they have a warm, quick-witted chat. Elsewhere in town, a teacher (Maya Hawke) struggles to contain her young students while a handsome cowboy (Rupert Friend) peers in her direction. And the motel owner (Steve Carell) generously responds to every complaint his lodgers bring to him.
Anderson’s ensemble cast is as synonymous with his style at this point as any of his visual trademarks, and every actor here is consistent with his eccentric dialogue. Schwartzman, a regular in Anderson films since the Rushmore days, bursts into the limelight with “Asteroid City,” and he nails the devious Anderson-esque blend of humor and melancholy. The screenplay (written by Anderson and co-authored with the story by filmmaker Roman Coppola) is one of his most poignant and pointillistically precise works.
As the Stargazer Convention begins, pauses and is delayed, Anderson balances the central action set in the desert with the dramatic challenges the New York City theater company faces in accurately portraying it. Finding Augie’s grief unfathomable, Jones wonders aloud, “Am I right with him?” But that feeling of being lost in character is part of what brings him closer to something resembling the truth.
Anderson’s ingenious framing mechanism, with actors playing actors, pits all of these characters against each other in a way that strengthens Asteroid City and transforms it into something richer than the utterly lovable desert summoner the trailers convey. Anderson focuses on the great cosmic mysteries of existence – some in space, some on earth and based on human emotions. His recent films have made it clear that he is a fiercely philosophical filmmaker and that he enjoys studying his artistic interests from afar – through the fog of memory in The Grand Budapest Hotel and by elaborating in The French Dispatch. makes storytelling itself the topic.
Photo: Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features
Anderson’s signature pastel palette, obsessively symmetrical compositions, and swirling artifices open up entire worlds in miniature. His carefully designed and constructed film dioramas often bridge the distance between cinema, theater and other visual art forms such as the “living pictures” that preceded radio. Over the course of their long collaboration, he and cinematographer Robert Yeoman have rewritten the rules of fast tracking shots: it’s hard to imagine another filmmaker panning and tilting the camera with this level of sophistication and dry wit.
Anderson’s films are also characterized by their emotional charisma. The characters are fantastic, but their penchant for escapism and adventure is palpable and coupled with a strong sense of whimsical wonder. His exotic locations make his stories seem like familiar, distant dreams. Nostalgia is at the heart of Asteroid City just as it was in its earlier films, although the imaginative design is far more imaginative than the actual story.
Anderson is rapidly evolving as a filmmaker, making his worlds more exaggerated and artificial with each new project, while gently inviting his audience to accept the universality of his characters’ feelings. With “Asteroid City” he conveys something essential about the role of artistic creation and re-creation, of art itself – particularly in the way it helps people to process trauma and the unexpected. In his view, art allows us to understand what we can and accept what we cannot. It’s entertaining on the surface, but it’s also a multi-layered existential poem. It’s Wes Anderson at his most sophisticated and magical – and at his most unique, in a way that no one else can capture – especially not the AI.
Asteroid City will hit theaters on June 16th in the US in limited release and June 23rd in wide distribution.
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