Asteroid City (2023)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Asteroid City (2023) – W. Anderson

I guess we all know what to expect from a Wes Anderson film by now: quirky characters played by name-brand actors (and handpicked children or adolescents), outstanding but heavily stylized art direction (with splendid use of colour), carefully chosen pop songs on the soundtrack, and a certain mix of nostalgic, melancholic, whimsical, absurd, wry, knowing, and even dark moments (often all at the same time).  So, with his 11^th feature, do we just get more of the same?  The answer is basically yes.  This time, Anderson takes us to Asteroid City (somewhere in the West of the USA but filmed in Spain) in the 1950s where young people who have won a science competition creating futuristic inventions (focused on space, mostly) are congregating for an event (chaired by General Grif Gibson – Jeffrey Wright). The main focus (if you are able to focus amidst the busy mise en scene) is on Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) who is chaperoning his son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) but who also has his three daughters with him because their car broke down on the way to the house of his father-in-law (Tom Hanks), who then arrives to take them back.  Also present are movie star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and her daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards).  These families are marked by absent spouses and their reaction to the fractured nuclear family (caused by death/illness/violence) is the dark vein that Anderson mines here.  But it is easy to be distracted by all of the other events, characters, asides, music, visual references, etc. that he throws at you.  For example, you wouldn’t be surprised if Wile E. Coyote showed up at any moment, as the art direction here is cribbed straight from Chuck Jones (the roadrunner is here, although the coyote is noted only in passing). There are also singing cowboys, flying saucers, a very topical quarantine, allusions to Marilyn Monroe – in fact, the whole thing is staged as a play within a movie, where Bryan Cranston narrates a recounting of what appears to be a Group Theatre production (with Willem Dafoe and his actors assisting playwright Edward Norton to develop what we are seeing in the film). As such, Anderson repeatedly breaks the third wall and the actors play characters playing characters, not just the characters themselves.  It is dizzying.  So, as before, your enjoyment of the film is going depend on your appetite for Anderson. If you’ve cultivated an appetite already, I would say that Asteroid City feels a bit fresher than The French Dispatch (2021) but doesn’t reach the exalted heights of the Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).  I haven’t checked out Anderson’s other 2023 releases – a trio of shorts drawn from the work of Roald Dahl on Netflix – which suggests a surging productivity in the director.  But how much is too much?