This review was initially published during the Cannes Film Festival. It’s being republished to mark the release of ‘Asteroid City’.
Asteroid City is Wes Anderson’s Renaissance moment. Though, unlike Beyoncé, the Moonrise Kingdom director won’t be dropping an unparalleled record of hit dance music, Asteroid City seems to represent the culmination of his richly dynamic oeuvre in a similar fashion; fusing a number of his pet themes and patented eccentricities in a brand new, highly-stylised setting. His landscape of choice this time around is the sprawling desert, which becomes a swirling tapestry of muted primary colours as we barrel into town on top of a freight train with Robert Yeoman’s guiding camera.
With a thriving local population of around 80 people, Asteroid City is a podunk town built around an ancient meteorite crater. Just down the way from an atomic testing facility, the area boasts a gas station, a classic American diner, and a tiny motel run by Steve Carrell – dressed head-to-toe in mint green, the comedian and The Office star is on top form in his onscreen return to middle management, embodying one of the most naturally Andersonian cameos in a playful movie chock-full of them. Trying to keep everyone happy as they file into town for the Junior Stargazers conference is no easy feat, even if you do have a vending machine that can produce the perfect martini-with-a-twist.
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Augie Steenbeck’s (Jason Schwartzman) family, for instance, is having car trouble. On top of the emotional turmoil of recently losing the mother to his four children, Augie has no choice but to call in reinforcements from his father-in-law (Tom Hanks). Fortunately for the now-widowed war photographer, the alluring Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) is also in town to chaperone her precocious daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards) while rehearsing for her latest Hollywood role. And then there’s the intriguing matter of that strange green shape in the sky…
Anderson applies another layer of fictionality to these events by framing them as a piece of theatre – written by playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), directed by a self-insert played by Adrien Brody, and meta-narrated by Bryan Cranston in a smooth-talking impression of a Playhouse 90 host. Throughout both stories the characters grapple with the dangers and the pleasures of the unknown; the vagaries of youth and age; and the magic of artmaking as a way of navigating, or at least accepting, the madness.
Over the course of a well-paced 104-minute runtime, Asteroid City makes aesthetic pleasures its primary focus, in the form of words, clothes, colours, even factual ephemera. There’s beauty in beauty for beauty’s sake, says Anderson. Why not get lost in it for an hour or so? “You can’t wake up if you don’t go to sleep,” the characters chant in unison during one feverish black-and-white interlude. You may as well put on an immersive film — preferably one that’s this precisely-rendered – and dream the day away instead.