Worth: $17.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Carell, Tony Revolori, Fisher Stevens, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Maya Hawke, Rupert Friend, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Liev Schreiber, Jake Ryan, Grace Edwards, Adrien Brody
Intro:
… consistently funny and mind-blowingly constructed …
Symmetrical dollhouses. Oversaturated pastels. Frank precociousness. An approach to filmmaking so meticulous as to become distracting. Wes Anderson is all this and more, but where his latest sci-fi-tinged feature is concerned, the takeaway is the way in which his trademark film formalism manifests in his narratives.
Wes Anderson’s films are never just films. They’re recollections of recollections, adaptations of adaptations. The film versions of books made from plays made from old TV shows. With Asteroid City, this takes the form of a TV production of the play ‘Asteroid City’, with Bryan Cranston doing his best Rod Serling affectation, interjecting with dramatisations of the making-of of the in-universe play.
Underneath Anderson’s traditional nesting doll of a framing device, he and his vast ensemble of name actors find themselves in the titular tourist trap of a town, attending a kids’ amateur astrology convention in the middle of a crater where a meteorite crash-landed so many moons earlier. It builds on the ‘alien lands in a small town’ tropes of ‘50s sci-fi, along with the contemporaneous fascinations with country-and-western cowboy culture and utterly bizarre novelty songs. It’s easy to forget, what with the generally blasé attitudes towards more recent announcements regarding the potential for actual alien lifeforms out there in the universe, that this is something that utterly fascinated people back in the day, and Anderson does well at recapturing that wonder.
But it’s through that wonder that he uncovers why such things caught on, and why fiction at large continues to have such a presence in our collective cultures: Because we need it to. Throughout the colourful and hilariously blunt cast of characters, we see people who are disillusioned by the world around them. Weary from loss, from grief, from dissatisfaction with their lot in life, or even just from boredom. Is it any wonder that they gravitate to the idea that a ship from another world would not only contact us, but could even take us away from all this?
Asteroid City refines Wes Anderson’s insistence of layers upon layers of artifice in his production values and his improvisational approach to writing dialogue, and makes a case for why such things are necessary. Not only can art provide an escape from the even-more-confounding everyday, but it can also provide a much-needed filter through which to view that everyday. A cardboard box full of lenses with which to look at the stars, so as not to burn our eyes from direct contact. A façade of control and design to help deal with how there is no-one at the typewriter. All summed up in a mantra that’s a riff on the classic Invasion Of The Body Snatchers quote: “Must not sleep, must warn others”, because this is still kitsch AF.
Consistently funny and mind-blowingly constructed, Asteroid City is at its best when it gets heartfelt and incisive about its own nature as a work of art harkening back to another time. It manages to avoid the unhealthy aspects of such a nostalgia exercise by being crystal-clear about the era in question, right down to the shadow of the mushroom cloud, acknowledging how much of that recollection is informed by conjecture, and showing how much our relationship with art and fiction hasn’t changed all that much since. For those who aren’t already tired of his ‘Sugary Brunch Served In An Awkward And Fun Setting’ way of doing things, Wes Anderson’s latest is an extra-large serving of what makes him so brilliant.
