Yahoo Movies Asteroid City, review: Gen-Z whimsy-seekers beware – this is Wes Anderson’s oddest film yet
Almost three decades into his filmmaking career, Wes Anderson is having unlikely social media moment. TikTok users reenact their daily routines to the score of The French Dispatch, with artsy insouciance, while AI mavens generate spoofs of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, aping his signature fastidious compositional style. Meanwhile, over on Instagram, cases of “accidental Wes Anderson” in architecture and nature have racked up enough likes to justify a hardback compilation of the best.
So it’s rather lovely – and exciting – that the Anderson film which has arrived when the director is trendier than ever is his oddest and most conceptually complex to date. For long-term fans it’s pure catnip, but you can’t help but wonder what on earth the Gen Z whimsy-seekers will think.
The first thing to know is that Asteroid City itself is two things: a place and a play. The former is a dinky American desert town where in the mid-1950s, folk from across the US have convened for a children’s astronomy meet-up. The latter is a stage production about this fictional meet-up, which is being prepared by a group of intense Actors’ Studio types in monochrome New York. In this second reality, Jason Schwartzman plays the actor Jones Hall, a former carpenter given to hooking the neck of his jumper over his nose, like James Dean. And in the first, he’s Jones’s character in the play, Augie Steenbeck, a recently widowed war photographer whose teenage son Woodrow (Eighth Grade’s Jake Ryan) is one of the convention’s young prizewinners.
While stranded in this faded-ice-cream-van-coloured nowhere place, grief is confronted, and new love falteringly explored. (For Augie, it’s with the Monroe-esque Hollywood actress Midge Campbell, played by Scarlett Johansson; for Woodrow, with Midge’s bright-spark daughter Dinah, played by Grace Edwards.) A visit from an alien prompts much panic and soul-searching, and then a government-mandated quarantine. Meanwhile, back east, Jones and his cast-mates are in an equal-but-opposite limbo: they too are engaged in a collective search for deeper meaning, albeit dug out from their own souls rather than pulled down the stars overhead.
It’s juicily ambitious stuff: imagine the familial tensions of The Royal Tenenbaums mapped onto an entire nation, but also playing out in multiple close-up vignettes. First on the phone, and then later in person, we see Augie’s strained relationship with his severe father-in-law Stanley – superbly played by Tom Hanks, one of a number of sharp additions to the now-bulging Anderson repertory troupe. Johansson, another newcomer, is also tremendous, while Schwartzman, an old hand since Rushmore, thrives in the most unsparing of the film’s double roles: he hasn’t been this good since his 1998 debut.
When I first saw Asteroid City at Cannes, I was coolly amazed by its intricate whirrings. A month on, it feels far warmer and more heartbreaking: a great film about the comforts and restrictions of finding a role in life, then seeing it through as best you can until the curtain falls. Naturally, the usual Anderson surface pleasures are all joyously present and correct, from the chocolate-box sets to the dreamlike unexplained details, urbane humour and sublime sight gags. (A nuclear warhead on a train is labelled “Caution: do not detonate without presidential approval”.) But despite what the AI bros might like to think, he remains completely inimitable.
Cert tbc, 104 min
