Review: Asteroid City

Image courtesy of Focus Features.

There are few other filmmakers whose work is as easily spottable as Wes Anderson. Within one minute of one of the director's films, there's no mistaking who is the author. Somewhere around his fifth or sixth film, it briefly felt as if his style was getting in the way of his films' emotional resonance - a charge that continues to occasionally, and unfairly, get lobbed at his work - but Anderson's past few movies have settled into familiar visually and stylistic territory, while venturing off into interesting directions otherwise.

His previous film, "The French Dispatch," was woefully underrated and, personally, I thought it ranked among his best. His latest, "Asteroid City," is a curious thing indeed - and I mean that in a good way. More so than, perhaps, any other film of the director, "Asteroid City" is one that I needed to sit on for a day or so to collect my thoughts before I wrote anything about it. I'm not sure that time span was enough.

On the surface, this is a typical Anderson affair - albeit one of the most visually stimulating of his career - filled with quirky characters (numerous big-name actors appear for one scene only before disappearing into the background), sardonic repartee, and fussy attention to the minutest details. You know, typical Wes Anderson stuff.

And yet, this is a film that's not as easy to pin down as some of his previous works. There's a lot going on here and this is the type of picture that makes you work for it. That's something that I enjoy, but whatever a viewer will get out of this particular film might involve the amount they're willing to put in.

To summarize - well, that's a bit of a fool's errand. In short, we are introduced at the beginning to what appears to be a 1950s broadcast of a documentary - narrated by a thinly mustachioed Bryan Cranston - chronicling the production of a play by a playwright named Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). Whenever the film is in black and white, we are witnessing the behind-the-scenes of the play's coming together; whenever we witness the brightly-colored desert town where the bulk of the action takes place, we're watching the actual play, although the sets and everything else give off the impression of a film, not a play.

It's 1955 and this desert town is hosting a space camp where a group of scholastically-gifted youths are competing for the top prize. The competition is being hosted by the military, which no doubt wants to snatch up the idea from the prizewinning teenager. 

Competitors include Ricky Cho (Ethan Josh Lee), who is there with his father (Stephen Park) and has a skeptical view toward authority; the slightly obnoxious Clifford (Aristou Meehan), who likes to challenge people to dare him to do all manner of foolish stunts and is attending with his grouchy father (Liev Schreiber); Dinah (Grace Edwards), who is there with her melancholic movie star mother Midge (Scarlett Johansson); and Woodrow (Jake Ryan), who is attending with his three lookalike sisters and father, war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), who has neglected to tell his brood that their mother died several weeks prior.

When Augie's car breaks down in the desert town, Augie begrudgingly calls his wealthy father-in-law, Stanley (Tom Hanks), who is still in pain from the loss of his daughter and seemingly on lukewarm terms with Augie. Other characters pop up, including a teacher (Maya Hawke) and her busload of students, a scientist (Tilda Swinton) and a general (Jeffrey Wright) who is tasked with leading the proceedings. Things are complicated when an alien ship lands during the opening ceremony - and a tall, lanky extraterrestrial scoops up the meteor that crashed into the town centuries before and is the sole reason for the event being held in that spot - and everyone present is forced to quarantine.

This sounds like a lot - and, at times, it is. At times, characters question their place in the universe and, ultimately, the film poses no less a question than what the meaning of life is and what exactly it is we're all doing here. However, it's often disguised by the film's clever dialogue and often most noticeable when the actors in the play within the movie press their director for more information on the play. "I don't understand the play," one character says, while another asks, "Am I doing it right?"

Similar to Anderson's "Rushmore," still one of the director's finest films, artifice is used to cover up pain and anguish. In that earlier film, Schwartzman's Max lived a performative and overly ambitious adolescence so as not to address the pain of having lost his mother. In "Asteroid City," Schwartzman - who gets the MVP here for his soulful portrayal of the heartbroken photographer - is masking the pain of having lost a wife by taking photos of everything from the alien visitor to Johansson's sad but flirtatious actress.

As I'd mentioned, "Asteroid City" is among Anderson's most visually stimulating films - there are mushroom clouds in the desert, gorgeous juxtapositions of differing color palettes, an expressive extraterrestrial, odd birds that roam across the screen, and the beautiful contrast of the desert landscape against the blue sky. For a movie so bright and colorful, there's a lot of heavy material floating between the numerous characters portrayed by its ridiculously talented cast. 

I'll probably need to see the film again to fully wrap my head around everything I witnessed here, but for now I'll say that even if "Asteroid City" doesn't rank as high as Anderson's previous film ("The French Dispatch") in his overall body of work, it's well worth seeing and another solid entry in this singular director's oeuvre.