Twee Time
at a new zenith, Wes Anderson Wes Andersons harder than he’s ever Wes Andersoned in a movie before.
Asteroid City
Director: Wes Anderson • Writer: Wes Anderson
Starring: For Christ’s sake – everybody.
USA • 1hr 45mins
Opens Hong Kong June 22 • IIB
Grade: C+
Okay, this is very nearly impossible to break down as a narrative. In Asteroid City, an old timey television anthology series host – yes, kids, those existed before Black Mirror or American Horror Story – played by Bryan Cranston serves as our guide through a convoluted framing device that sets up this tale of… widower and war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), trapped in aggressively pastel desert town Asteroid City, population 87, after escorting his genius son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) to the Junior Stargazer science competition. He’s still kind of mourning his wife, and his father-in-law, Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks, stepping in for a ’rona-positive Bill Murray) doesn’t like him. He tolerates him for the kids – who are gawdawful. The Host is setting up the story as written by esteemed playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and directred by legendary (?) director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), who’s been known to take tips from his wife Polly (Hong Chau). She’s just filed for divorce.
Right. Oh, it is in fact 1955 – coming up on the Space Age. Also in town is a motley crew of characters, including scandalised movie star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), whose daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards) is also a Junior Stargazer; Stargazer parents JJ Kellogg (Liev Schreiber), Sandy Borden (Hope Davis), and Roger Cho (Stephen Park); Stargazer contest host and US Army General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright); the town mechanic Hank (Matt Dillon), the motel manager (Steve Carell) and a bunch of cowboys (Rupert Friend, Jarvis Cocker) who are passing through. Oh, and the main attraction in town is a meteorite crater, which also gets the attention of The Alien (Jeff Goldblum), whose visit prompts Gibson to quarantine Asteroid City, a typically paranoid 1950s response to the unknown. Amid the drama, Midge and Augie kinda sorta fall in love?
This Andersons so hard
The level of cutesy, twee, deliberate stiltedness and willful artifice of Asteroid City cannot be understated, and right off the bat I should come clean: I don’t like Wes Anderson’s twee artificiality. It must also be acknowledged that Anderson has his fans, a rabid bunch that, in its soft opening weekend overseas, ensured Asteroid City blew The Flash’s per screen box office average out of the damn water (US$140,000 to US$13,000). And there’s no denying Anderson’s distinct brand of artistic whimsy, here going above and beyond what he’s ever tried before. It’s like he opened a bottle of wine, put his feet up on a desk and said, “Fuck it. All in! Let’s get to Babelsberg and construct the fakest town ever put to film.” They actually went to Spain, but whatevs.
As a filmmaker Anderson has come a long way from his slighly kooky, off-beat yet much more grounded comedies of the late-1990s: Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, really turning a corner for the smug and affected with The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou in 2004. It seemed Anderson’s peak Anderson came with The Grand Budapest Hotel, which managed to strike a crucial balance among aesthetic, narrative and characters you could actually give a shit about. It wasn’t just art direction and production design for the sake of art direction and production design. Anderson’s nadir came with The French Dispatch – which was. Asteroid City is a step backwards, totally eliminating any attempt at resonance or empathy and setting a new bar. This vague, cosmic-tinged romance is the most vacuously performative Anderson’s ever been.
And because of that, for every devout follower who will marvel at Anderson’s finely manicured spaces, carefully controlled chaos and deadpan line readings, there will be detractors pointing out how cloying, icy and soulless all the drollery is. Both are right – I’m in the latter group – and so if nothing else Anderson must be applauded for his ability to pick his lane and gleefully stay in it; make his films the way he wants to and to hell with eveyone else. I admire that. I just don’t like the bullshit final product.
Particularly when it’s more notable for its starry, loose repertory cast – most of them wasted but which also includes Tilda Swinton, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Tony Revolori, Sophia Lillis, Margot Robbie, Fisher Stevens and probably about a thousand people I’m forgetting – than for any kind of insight or effort to determine the meaning of life and the nature of the universe. Or something. Anything. Asteroid City is distant; studied to within an inch of its life and so emotionally disengaging. Are we supposed to care about the fragile romance blossoming between Augie and Midge? Is that what it is? Are we supposed to leave thinking that even in the most arid of wastelands we can find connections? Is this a paranoid COVID allegory? You know what? Don’t care.
Which is not to impugn the stellar work by Anderson regulars, cinematograher Robert Yeoman (Bridesmaids), production designer Adam Stockhausen (West Side Story) and costume designer Milena Canonero (an Oscar winner for Marie Antoinette among others), all of whom go above and beyond here, and who so flawlessly execute Anderson’s twee vision it almost makes you like it. Almost. — DEK