In the future, everyone will be in a Wes Anderson film for 15 minutes. Or maybe just 15 seconds. Indeed, that overcrowded scenario is almost upon us already judging by the feted American writer-director’s latest exercise in hyper-stylised highbrow whimsy, Asteroid City, a visually ravishing love letter to retro-kitsch 1950s Americana which features a staggeringly busy cast list, even by Anderson’s usual maximalist standards.
Filmed in Spain during Covid lockdown, Asteroid City stars Anderson regulars Jason Schwartzmann, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Jeffrey Wright, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Rupert Friend, Bryan Cranston and others, while new repertory company members include Tom Hanks, Margot Robbie, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Maya Hawke, Liev Schreiber and dozens more. The only glaring absence is Anderson’s long-time screen mascot Bill Murray, who was reportedly on board but dropped out after catching Covid. Hanks plays the gruff older patriarch character presumably earmarked for Murray.
All those online pranksters who have memed Anderson’s instantly recognisable visual style into a million fictional genre parodies with Midjourney AI software can take a well-earned rest now. A multi-generational atomic-age sci-fi rom-com featuring singing cowboys, extra terrestrials, femme fatales and oodles of retro-futurist space-age technology, Asteroid City finds Anderson almost out-meme-ing his admirers. Indeed, with its mega-sized ensemble cast, kaleidoscopic pastel colour scheme, methodical use of symmetrical composition, brief detours into stop-motion animation, precisely choreographed lateral-panning camerawork by Anderson veteran Robert Yeoman, and wistfully jaunty score by Alexandre Desplat, another regular collaborator, this may well be the Wes Anderson-est film ever made.
Asteroid City world premieres in the main Cannes competition this week, earning mostly rave reviews so far. Anderson’s solid fan-base, combined with that glittering all-star cast and distribution from Universal’s boutique division Focus Features for the first time since Moonrise Kingdom (2012), should add up to healthy box office prospects for the film’s June release.
Set in 1955, the plot to Asteroid City feels relatively conventional after the episodic, time-jumping portmanteau format of Anderson’s last feature, The French Dispatch (2021). A tiny American desert community, famed for its meteor crater, is hosting a gathering of stargazing science students at the same time as fate conspires to bring a disparate bunch of travellers together in the same town. These include grieving single dad and war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Schwartzmann), his flinty father-in-law Stanley Zak (Hanks), Marilyn Monroe-like Hollywood screen star Midge Campbell (Johansson) and US Army general Grif Gibson (Wright). With atomic bomb tests on the horizon, Cold War paranoia in the air and UFOs spotted overhead, the gathering takes a dramatic turn into science fiction, and military personnel arrive to put the entire town into quarantine.
Around this fairly simple set-up Anderson adds layers of post-modern scaffolding, fourth wall-breaking and meta jokes. Appearing sporadically in retro-styled TV show clips, filmed in luminous vintage monochrome and narrower aspect ratio than the main colour-saturated widescreen scenes, Cranston plays a Rod Serling-like narrator who purports to tell the back story to the birth of Asteroid City as a stage play by Conrad Earp (Norton), a gay dramatist with Tennessee Williams overtones. The play’s gestation includes input from a lightly fictionalised version of the fabled Actors’ Studio in New York, home of Method acting and launchpad for the likes of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando. Indeed, a scene in which Schwartzmann’s “backstage” actor character calls on Earp to push for the role of Steenbeck feels like a veiled allusion to Brando’s famously explosive audition for Williams in 1947, which secured his career-making stage role as Stanley Kowalski in A Steetcar Named Desire.
Like all Anderson’s work, Asteroid City is an exquisite jewel box of candy-shop colours, meticulously detailed production design and self-aware, sharp-witted, ultra-deadpan dialogue. At its best the director’s unmistakable signature style is extremely beautiful and consistently droll, at worst it can feel airless and aloof and merely decorative. The fastidious way in which Anderson pre-plans and maps out his films, animating the screenplay in digital storyboard form and initially voicing every role himself, leaves little room for even the most skilled performers to flex their acting muscles. It is no coincidence that every one of his characters speaks in the same pithy, arch, Anderson-esque tone.
That said, there is an appealing seam of melancholy to Asteroid City, as with most of Anderson’s work, that belies its initial surface effect as a frictionless live-action cartoon. For all their comic sass, these damaged souls have one foot in the lonely, wounded America of JD Salinger, Carson McCullers, Raymond Carver and Edward Hopper. Johannsson and Schwartzmann certainly breathe soulful sadness into their broken, bereaved characters while Wright, Norton and Brody blend comedy with tragedy in their spare handful of lines. The younger cast members, especially Jake Ryan, also put a more natural spin on Anderson’s wry one-liners, sounding less ironic and more authentically awestruck by his Looney Tunes universe.
For Anderson fans, Asteroid City will be a pure guiltless pleasure, a full sensory immersion in his dazzling Day-Glo Pop Art toybox. For agnostics, this is still one of the director’s finer efforts, low on the childlike whimsy and forced eccentricity that mars his minor works. More critical viewers may question why Anderson always sticks so firmly in his stylistic comfort zone instead of trying something radically different once in a while. But why ask for the moon when we have the stars? Dozens and dozens and dozens of stars.
Director: Wes Anderson
Screenplay: Wes Anderson, story by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola
Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan, Jeff Goldblum
Cinematography: Robert Yeoman
Editing: Barney Pilling
Music: Alexandre Desplat
Production design: Adam Stockhausen
Producers: Wes Anderson, Steven Rales, Jeremy Dawson
Production company: Indian Paintbrush (US)
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In English
105 minutes
