Set in a fictional American desert town circa 1955, the itinerary of a Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention (organized to bring together students and parents from across the country for fellowsh...
As much as I liked Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, it left me with one polarizing question to ponder: he knows how to light a scene, to inject emotion into anything via colors and sound, to offer plenty of composition but without a passable foundation or story to guide his style along, is it really worth gushing over his work?
Asteroid City says YES.
Off the bat, his ever-evolving style and penchant for whimsical weirdness continues to balloon into absurdist but pure distillation; this, in my opinion, is probably the most unique, incandescently beautiful of his collection since Fantastic Mr. Fox and GBH. Yes, it boasts a beautiful clay-colored, orange, turquoise and sky blue color palette, in deeply saturated pastels but the real star here is the purposely artificial production design. There’s intense levels of artifice in the cartoonish settings and stage-like world set up, ripe with so much detail and specificity about 1950’s Americana with some semblances of Synecdoche, New York, one that can’t cover the anxieties and injuries of American life with it’s obvious fakeness.
The symmetrical camerawork makes a return and is just as hypnotizing as ever, dialogue remains fairly witty, costumes design is still wonderfully quirky and as a director, Wes remains as composed and serene as ever. Every actor and character brings their own set of eccentricities to the story, the newcomers adapt wonderfully to Andersons and as a master of establishing tone and the rules that guide the world, the end result remains just as visually arresting as it is very tight in its structure, a welcome return to form compared to before.
I’m not the biggest fan of deadpan humor but this is one of the few times it does work for me and its timely reflections of our time in the pandemic is also worth a few chuckles at our expense.
This is the first time, I believe, that Anderson’s tackled a film-within-a-film idea in his projects and he hits the ground running with it, immediately and thematically buoying that tried and true concept with a pleasant simplicity and intricate complexity that makes this story feel more…..complete than The French Dispatch. This perplexing pile of postmodernism with dizzying nested narrative eggs seems specifically designed to do away with ambiguity while occupying itself entirely in deconstruction within the meta-narrative framing. Destabilizing by design, it takes enough strides into dissecting loss, paranoia, existential desolation and the relentless search for some kind, any kind of human connection within and beyond American family values. We, as a species, have made the common mistake of constantly alienating ourselves from what we fear or don’t understand and have to resort to create a form of order so we don’t lose ours minds.
Everyone is trying to scurry for cover in what’s nothing more but a farce of Americana and the savant blankness that comes out of that makes up some of the most surreal yet cathartic moments of Wes Anderson’s entire catalog. It’s a story that does thankfully complement the style chosen very well, paying little mind to characters’ wants or any sort of classic hero’s journey because no set destination was ever really intended.
That being said, the story is still more or less a framing device for the film-within-a-film idea and every time it cuts back and forth between the play and real world, it can disrupt the pacing and momentum a little bit. And me personally, the music isn’t entirely memorable with the exception of a few tracks; not as notable compared to his previous works.
Between its intentionally detached script and cerebral packaging, it’s not hard to see people taking the nature of this story for granted, thinking that Wes is full of himself or picking apart how much of a crashing bore it can be. Me personally, it makes for a better Wes Anderson viewing experience than his more recent flicks.
