Asteroid City

Asteroid City

Director – Wes Anderson

Writers – Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola

2023, USA

Stars – Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks

 

It’s all dressed up to impress and look gorgeous with interesting baubles in the pockets; it has a pop-up inclination to plot and deadpan humour from a ridiculously starry cast. It’s a Wes Anderson film, which always fascinate but can prove hit-or-miss (with me, I adore ‘Isle of Dogs’; indifferent to ‘The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou’) and this won’t win any converts. The detail and affectations are the main draw and the cast know just how to play this pokerfaced without losing any emotional ramifications there may be. Asteroid City itself is a memorable half-built town erected on the premise of a crater and the Space Age, a construction that feels like it owes much to Anderson’s animated ventures as ‘Grand Budapest Hotel’ owed to miniatures. It is meticulously detailed, attractive, playful, frustrating, surprising, pretentious, charming and a little hollow.

 

The meta-narrative, the stories within stories, hints at Anderson’s artist’s anxieties and although there’s several black-and-white scenes that hit the mark ~ the audition; the break-up ~ it’s the vibrant over-populated Asteroid City that will likely stick in the memory. Nevertheless, Anderson’s carnival of insouciant director’s indulgence hides a spinning pinwheel of anxiety about the artist’s lot. How to take yourself seriously when there are many excellent parodies of your signature style on Youtube? No wonder there’s a self-reckoning encoded somewhere in here, even as people unimaginatively call it "the Most Wes Anderson film by Wes Anderson yet". The accentuated technique, the affectations and ingenuity is a style he's even more refined over time, but those are the very same idiosyncrasies that turn-off non-fans. That archy-pipe-in-the-mouth-intellectualism is as much a gag as a symbol of it's somewhat middle class white concerns.

But there are so many side stories alluded to (cops-and-robbers high-speed chase regularly charges through the barely-built town) and packed in that the meta angle doesn’t quite dominate, isn’t the main source of fascination however many intriguing asides it offers. Or maybe it is just that that’s the side that interests me less. It’s not that there’s nothing resonant here, but it’s more an enjoyable confection than something that’s going to touch something deep-seated (like childhood in ‘Moonrise Kingdom’, or family in ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’). The impro song and Goldblum cameo were my highlights, although the window conversations and black-and-white movie homages linger long after.