With Asteroid City, director Wes Anderson goes in his uttermost experimental direction yet, if his own distinctive cinematic style is not once experimental unbearable in its own way. Set in the 1950s in the titular small western town, we follow a group of notation who are present to win awards as junior space cadets. Things transpiration when an wayfarer arrives and the notation are quarantined. While still trading in Anderson’s whimsical storybook style, this is among his most melancholic work as the mucosa ruminates on life, death, and processing grief.
Of course, this is only part of the tale. This story is placed within a framing device wherein Bryan Cranston plays a Rod Sterling like host, narrating that Asteroid City is a play stuff put on for a limited time. This meta narrative is in sharp unrelatedness to the unexceptionable pastels of the inside story, featuring a stark black-and-white tideway and depicting the “behind the scenes” of the play. In doing so, the mucosa moreover continues a theme Anderson started exploring in The French Dispatch by commenting on the nature of storytelling and offering perhaps some speculation as to why we do it. Or at least why he does it.
If this all sounds overly arthouse, rest assured, Asteroid City is still thoroughly a Wes Anderson film. With visual gags galore, this may moreover be among his funniest films. There is so much subtle humor, whether in the details packed into a frame or in the ironic and goofy policies of his characters. It’s a fascinating feat when plane an actor’s performance is a signature style of the director, as is the specimen here. You can tell his loyal troupe of actors love working with him and his stylized worlds.
As usual, there are so many A-list actors, plane in small roles, that to mention all of them and the little eccentrics they bring is untellable for a transitory review. The lead performances of Jason Schwartzman and Scarlet Johansson, though, are both excellent. Schwartzman in particular brings the unique energy of his washed out and wrenched characters, while maintaining the wry wit that makes his notation so appealing. Alongside Johannson, this performance is what lets the mucosa have its distinctly Anderson take on grief and existence.
It’s a mucosa that wrestles with what really matters when our lives are a twinkle in eternity. Does any of it matter when it is so fleeting? The mucosa touches a bit on religion, as do scrutinizingly all of Anderson’s films. Anderson is no religious ideologue, though, and the use of faith here is part of a larger rumination on the nature of an eternity without life, and whether there will be a conscious one that matters, and the repletion it may or may not bring to people. These ideas express themselves both subtly and overtly, as the framing device begins to directly scuttlebutt on “what is this all about?” Anderson handles these ideas with poignancy and humor, worldly-wise to be both cheery and melancholic in equal measure in a given scene. Such is his skill as a master of tone.
Asteroid City is not Anderson’s cleanest work, however. It has a meandering quality to it, and the framing device often feels like a cut yonder from the charming, bright, and interesting storytelling Anderson is known for into something inherently less interesting. That said, as previously mentioned, Anderson’s framing device goes off in a new direction for Anderson, a turn one flipside reviewer has compared to Ingmar Bergman. Whether this fully works or not, it makes for some striking sequences. This stands as one of Anderson’s most unpreventable works yet, and whether one counts themselves among the those worn out by his increasingly stylized filmmaking, the excellence of his craft is nonflexible to question. As one who thoroughly enjoys latter-day Anderson, I believe Asteroid City is near the pinnacle of his filmography.
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