Wes Anderson’s latest cliché: Asteroid City reviewed
After the screening, I went to see Wes Anderson’s latest film, asteroid city, I heard a few critics say how much they loved his films and what a genius he was, and I wanted to interrupt with, “What, even though he’s been making the exact same film for years?”? Or, “What, even though I was always waiting for it to take shape and it never happened?” But I was too shy, so I’m letting it all out here. The problem with Wes Anderson films, I now realize, is that they are Wes Anderson films and my patience is running out.
asteroid city is a film set in a play, which in turn is set in a television documentary, and if that sounds confusing, that’s probably because it is. It’s got a starry cast that’s not only longer than your arm but also longer than the arm of someone who says he has arms so long it’s crazy and he had to join the circus. The cast includes Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Matt Dillon, Margot Robbie, Steve Carell, Edward Norton and Rupert Friend. Apparently it also stars Jarvis Cocker in a blinkable role, but I blinked and missed it. It’s either that or I’m dozing off, which should be more likely. I don’t know how Anderson attracts such A-listers. What is it about him?
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The late film critic Roger Ebert once said that Anderson suffered from “incurable whims” and that they were seemingly incurable and getting worse. The Grand Budapest Hotel, French shipping… pure whimsy with a deadpan comic tone, an over-the-top color palette, highly stylized production design, side-moving camera, and fetishized retro objects at the expense of plot development or taking the characters somewhere that might matter. And no amount of vintage luggage (or quirky fonts) can make up for that.
This play is set in the 1950s. A playwright (Norton) is writing a play about a group of people traveling to the one-horse town of Asteroid City in the Arizona desert where a meteor once landed, while a TV host (Cranston) presents a show about it. Anderson always has to design his films in such a way that it is clear that they are staged. Several families get together in Arizona to look at the sky and take part in a kind of science competition. However, their activities are interrupted by the arrival of a real alien (Jeff Goldblum: I forgot to say), after which a general (Wright) quarantines those present on site. Among them are Midge Campbell (Johannsson), a Hollywood femme fatale rehearsing a script; Augie Steenbeck (Schwartzman), newly widowed war photographer and father of four; Stanley Zak (Hanks), Augie’s father-in-law; and many more, all arriving in vintage cars with vintage luggage but not with goggles and blaring horns, although I always expected that.
What happens? Midge and Augie are having a fleeting affair and he takes a naked picture of her (that doesn’t follow my rule that there should be a naked man for every naked woman in a movie), but since it doesn’t mean to either of them, it doesn’t mean either nothing to us. I kept trying to give it a form. Is it sadness? For example, Augie waited three weeks to tell his children that their mother had died, but even that gets nowhere. Maybe we’re not meant to feel. I suppose one could argue (she says reluctantly) that it’s ironic, that it’s about emotional distance and that we’re meant to feel just as disconnected as the characters. The problem with this is that it takes a long time of an hour and 40 minutes.
Anderson is an author with a distinctive artistic voice, but it’s certainly about time he had something to say about it.