Asteroid City
“Asteroid City” has been described by other writers as “the most Wes Anderson of the Wes Anderson movies”, and I can see what they mean. Every ounce of the movie is created in his unique style of art, dialogue, image arrangement and execution. And it succeeds as being a delightful Wes Anderson pic, for the most part.
The tale “Asteroid City” weaves is original and hilarious, but it writes itself into a bit of a corner that prevents it from really sticking the landing the way his other films do. It's such an oddball concept – a black and white meta program describing the creation of the stage play-within a film that unfolds said play. It's almost like, to me at least, that he wrote the “film” portion of “Asteroid City” and realized it wasn't quite full enough to be an entire feature, so he frameworked it into a “making of” to create a secondary story to lengthen the experience. If all of this sounds confusing, that's because it is.
That isn't to say it's bad. It's certainly not. The acting is top of the top, and the cast is right there with it. The performances are so good and the interactions are so well brought to life by the incredible cast of people like Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Adrien Brody, Edward Norton and Willem Dafoe just to name a few of the heavy hitters.
Schwartzman shines as the lead, as he has before in Wes Anderson projects (like one of my favourites of his filmography - “The Darjeeling Limited”. He's probably one of my favourite underrated actors, he kills it in everything, including as the hilarious turned ominous villain “The Spot” in this summer's smash hit “Into The Spider-Verse”. He plays a hardened, bordering on emotionless field photographer here, and without getting into spoilers is able to play a secondary role as well with equal tact. It can be pretty fun when actors get to play double roles in projects.
Johansson plays a overly dramatic caricature of an actress and knocks it out of the park, she's a real highlight. And her scenes with Schwartzman all play out like a masterclass of dialogue exchanges.
The sets all seem to be dreamy and artificial, despite much of the film taking place outdoors. Everything has a sort of storybook aesthetic. And maybe this falls into the whole angle of it being a play being dramatized within a making of. Like I said before, oddball.
I think this simply boils down to a real easy assessment: if you like Wes Anderson's previous films, there is definitely at least something for you to take away from this that you'll like. If you haven't been sold yet on any of his projects, this won't be the one to do it.
7/10
