If there’s one director whose work can be recognised solely by just one frame from their film, it’s Wes Anderson. With painterly tableaux and star names often delivering wry dialogue straight to camera it’s a template he’s rarely waivered from with his ten films to date and his latest film, Asteroid City, keeps to the format.
Set in the 1950’s in a desert town of the film’s title so named because an asteroid crashed there thousands of years previously. Now it is a town built around the observatory run by the US government. It’s also where there’s an annual convention for teenage inventors who have put together an array of the pointless (a machine that projects pictures on to the moon) to the deadly (a working death ray gun). Frankly school science lessons would have been far more interesting if we’d been taught stuff like this. Instead we had the sort of ineffectual and woolly minded liberal teacher that when asking us what we understood by gravity, we threw him off the sports hall roof.
Against a background where atom bomb tests frequently go off, Asteroid City hosts the event where after a bizarre occurrence during the ceremony the town goes into lockdown preventing anyone from leaving and the eclectic attendees now live together until the lockdown is lifted. So we have Jason Schwartzman as a widowed war photographer along with his triplets (who effortlessly steal the show) who finds love interest with a film star (Scarlett Johansson) as his neighbour. Their story is the main one but in support there’s a plethora of big star names in small scale roles that includes Tom Hanks, Steve Carrell, Matt Dillon and Tilda Swinton amongst many others.
But Anderson’s tableaux turns out to be a stage play (indicated by the change of screen format to 4 x 3) written by an emotional writer Edward Norton and narrated by Bryan Cranston breaking the fourth wall addressing the audience directly about a number of themes of the play within a film that includes isolation and loneliness wrapped in pathos and frankly it all gets a bit much with the film, the play and the actors merging into a highly stylized blob
For fans of Anderson Asteroid City is more of the same they will love but for others this is the usual style over substance and the characters are wafer thin with little emotional depth with the self- consciously quirky dialogue that makes it hard to see the appeal for so many noted actors. And that’s the frustration with many of his films that they are brilliantly realized combinations of production design, cinematography and costume but are bereft of engaging content. And when one character utters the line, ‘You cant wake up if you don’t fall asleep’ audiences might be only too willing to prove him right.
related feature: Tilda Swinton at the Dr Strange UK premiere
related feature: Wes Anderson’s ‘The French Dispatch’ – REVIEW
Here’s the Asteroid City trailer……
I so dislike reviewers who slam good work simply for a chance to sling in what they perceive to be a clever hit or two, hoping to be quoted somewhere where it matters. This reviewer is one of those. A part of the reason he bashed this film is because he completely misses the point of why the characters don’t drone on an on to spell out all the details of their lives. Rather than try to dig and and go to second and third layers, he’d rather just call the characters ‘wafer thin’ and with little ’emotional depth’. Boy, is he wrong. This film is a marvelous piece of work. Simon wants to be the odd man out and slam it just to be different. I’ve know dozens of entertainment writers and critics for almost six decades, and guys like this are at the bottom of the barrel.