Directed by Wes Anderson
Showing at Picturehouse at FACT
Reviewed by Nick Daly
I was certain I knew what to expect before watching Asteroid City. Wes Anderson is a director that seems to have a certain formula that can be relied on. Meticulous composition. Saturated colour palette. Deadpan dialogue. Melancholy characters. There’s even a joke that he continually makes the same film over and over. So, it caught me off guard when Asteroid City didn’t actually begin, as the film’s poster and trailer suggest, in an American desert town. Instead, it begins as a black-and-white TV broadcast about the behind-the-scenes production of a play. A play called Asteroid City. Yes, Asteroid City isn’t real. Of course, we – the audience – are aware of this, but the surprising thing is the film is too.
After this introduction, hosted by Bryan Cranston, the screen changes its aspect ratio and bursts into pastel colour, and the film – or the play – begins. A typical Wes Anderson ensemble cast arrive at the titular town for a youth astronomy convention. Asteroid City is a small rural town with a diner, a garage, a bridge that leads to nowhere and a gigantic crater. It’s almost like a liminal space. One of the visitors is war photojournalist Augie (Jason Schwartzman), dealing with the recent death of his wife and concealing the news from his children, much to his stepfather’s dismay (Tom Hanks). Another is world-famous, world-weary actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), with her daughter in tow. When a claymation alien arrives amidst a stargazing session, the town is put into quarantine by the U.S. government and these collection of characters are left to deal with the aftermath of its encounter.
Wes Anderson’s films have always had something of a self-aware and detached quality. Their stylised, eccentric nature ensure that there’s never a moment they’re mistaken for reality. Asteroid City takes this up a notch or two. Running alongside the narrative in the town, and intersected throughout, is a pseudo-documentary about its conception and production, with the same cast appearing as actor and actress versions of their characters. Additionally, title cards appear notifying the viewer that the film is entering each act. Title cards can work sometimes. It worked in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds because each chapter was like its own self-contained film. In Asteroid City, it’s simply a distraction. But maybe that’s the point. Try your best to be remotely engaged in the plot and the film will repeatedly yank you back out.
It’s not just the narrative that’s having an existential crisis. The character’s seem to be too. Augie and Midge talk to each other from their windows across a road. They describe how they’re both wounded people but are unable to express it to each other. Evidently, they’re not just isolated in Asteroid City, they’re also isolated within themselves. This existentialism even extends to outside the boundaries of the play. “I still don’t know what this play is about,” says Jones Hall, the fictional actor who is playing Augie. After nonsensically burning his hand on a stove, he’s confused by his character’s motivations and has walked off the set of the play to talk to the director backstage. “It doesn’t matter,” says the director, “Keep going. You’re doing great.”
The film seems to be a reflection of life itself, or at least Wes Anderson’s perception of it. You can search for answers, in the motivations of your character in a play, in the significance of an alien’s visit, or in depths of your own personal grief, but it’s the relationships we have with each other that ultimately persist. The unfortunate thing is that these relationships within the film prove difficult to care about. Also like life sometimes, the film is an exercise in perseverance. Dense with the weight of its own obscure themes and a lack of conventional plot, navigating the film is a bit like writing this review, which is to say is like pulling teeth (now it’s my turn to be meta, Wes). For a film about the nature of life, there’s a quality to it that’s ironically lifeless. Can a film of this muddled, tedious nature simply be excused because, well, that’s how life is? Sometimes, a film is a film for a reason, but it brings up the age-old cinematic question: is film entertainment or an art form? If you’re asking me, I think it’s a bit of both, and the films that adopt this belief (not straying too far in either direction) are very often the best ones. Similarly, Anderson is at his best when his work straddles between reality and stylisation. His quirkiness sings when there’s a heart behind it; something that appears to be missing in Asteroid City.
Apparently Anderson wrote the film during the most intense period of the pandemic, which seems to explain a few things: the quarantine, the isolation, the grief. Covid upended our worldview and frazzled our brains, so maybe this film is a suitable response to it. It’ll be fascinating to look back on this period in film history and understand how the pandemic affected cinema not just financially, but also thematically. Reactions from other directors, such as Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes, have been to reflect on their own past and give an ode to cinema in films like The Fabelmans and Empire of Light. Intriguingly, Anderson has instead descended into a kind of madness by going to a more abstract, experimental and existential place.
We’re also at a rather interesting point in Anderson’s career. Recently, Wes Anderson imitations are all over the Internet due to a viral TikTok trend, and even AI has been used to parody his work by incorporating his style into existing films like The Lord of the Rings. This year has proven that his aesthetic is most certainly ingrained in popular culture, and it’s ironic that it’s in the same year that he releases a film that deconstructs his own work. With many feeling he reached his magnum opus in 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, at 54-years-old, where does a director, now entering the latter stages of his career, go from there? The answer might be Asteroid City.