Selected US cinemas from 16 June; on general release in the UK from 23 June
Wes Anderson’s latest outing, Asteroid City, is the most Wes Andersonesque film you could hope for. A pure exercise in style with very little depth and some irony, it comes at a time when the social media bubble is filled with of franchises such as Harry Potter and Star Wars made in the style of the Houston-born director.
Set in the desert town of in the mid-1950s, the film’s narrative focus is hard to work out, largely because there are so many characters and so many stars, such as Margot Robbie, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton and Willem Defoe, often in tiny roles.
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Introduced to the audience via the now familiar stage-play trick of dividing films into acts (there are three here), Asteroid City sees students and parents from all over the US gathering for a scholarly competition where gifted kids (“junior stargazers”) present their most recent, bizarre discoveries to a bunch of local astronomers and military officers.
The widowed war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) barely stands out from the crowd, along with his stereotypically geeky son Woodrow (Jake Ryan), and snobbish actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), Augie’s love interest.
Events seems to unfold rather casually and there is a sense that something needs to happen – if only to move on with the plot. There is no time to dig deep into anything and all the characters are reduced to caricatures, with their motivations often unclear. For example, Dr Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) seems fascinated by Woodrow’s talent for astronomy, but what is it about him in particular? The motel manager, played by Steve Carell, sells tiny, worthless plots of land – again, why? Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks) constantly berates his son-in-law Augie – you get the picture.
A sudden visit from an alien (the actor is credited but it’s a bit of a spoiler), who lands from a flying saucer and steals a small meteorite, puts Asteroid City into lockdown, with authorities preventing all visitors and residents from leaving and spreading news of what they have witnessed.
In fairness, the alien is also the nicest character in the film, together with a Road Runner-like cuckoo that appears and disappears in the blink of an eye. The extraterrestrial seems unable to speak and has a very stylised, yet ridiculous, appearance. He has no real function other than forcing the characters to remain stuck in the desert, and nothing more is discovered about him.
Technically speaking, Anderson is impeccable. He marshals a great technical team: Alexandre Desplat’s score is excellent, Adam Stockhausen’s production design imaginative, Robert Yeoman’s cinematography nifty (and obsessively symmetrical) and Milena Canonero’s pastel 1950s outfits just perfect. However, unlike other Anderson classics (think The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel), they don’t add weight to a well-written script, but are just part of a wonderfully packaged, rather empty box.
All in all, Asteroid City’s loose narrative structure only serves as a pretext to show off Anderson’s qualities as a visual artist, rather than as a director.
