‘Asteroid City’ Masks Artificial Emotions Behind Pastel Scenery | Review
Wes Anderson has always been something of an acquired taste for critics and casual audiences alike. For nearly three decades, he has delivered films about grief and dysfunctional families, often from a more impersonal stance than his peers. Asteroid City, like the rest of his catalog of films, is stylistically beautiful. Every frame is bursting with life—both the grayscale reality and fictitious pastel tale—and the symmetrical framing and snap-zooms keep its audience engaged. But when you strip away the visual components, the script is as bleak as the miserable characters it contains.
Asteroid City feels like Anderson’s most self-aggrandizing film to date. Which is saying a lot when his last three live-action films felt like voyeuristic ventures into one man’s obsession with viewing the world through the perfect pastels of vintage postcards. At least with The French Dispatch and The Grand Budapest Hotel, there was something that passed for real human emotion, rather than the uncomfortable liminal space lurking behind the cotton candy colors of Asteroid City’s scenery.
It is a script that feels smug in its execution, dancing around real meaning and connection, to proudly point at a sign that reads: “This is a film about grief. Don’t you get that?” Yes, that is hyperbole, but only to some extent. Asteroid City is quite garish in the way it tells the audience what it all means, instead of allowing the story to show that meaning. It wants so badly to be deep and insightful, but its beauty hides a story that is as flimsy as its set flats.
Image via Focus Features
The actors—of which there are many, and most of which are nothing more than useless cardboard cutouts—are let down twice by the film in that regard. With the exception of Bryan Cranston, Adrien Brody, and Edward Norton, most of the cast play two characters: actors and their roles in the televised play about Asteroid City. Who they are as actors is of little consequence, or at least the film cares very little about trying to flesh them beyond stereotypes with paper-thin prerogatives.
There are loose outlines of a compelling story within Asteroid City, particularly where Jason Schwartzman’s Augie Steenbeck is concerned. But the script never pushes him to look beyond the surface of grief, romance, or an alien encounter. Nothing ever really tips the emotional scale—which is evident throughout the film, but in Act 3 when both Augie, and his actor, reach their “ah-ha!” moment. But it’s hardly earned for either version of Schwartzman, especially when his stakes are non-existent.
Image via Focus Features
The audience is told that Augie is grieving the death of his wife, but the emotion never fully manifests itself, not even in a nebulous sort of way. Even his relationship with Scarlett Johansson’s Midge Campbell feels like a hollow, ghost of an emotion. Like a game of telephone, passing on a story about how the duo has formed some sort of bond through their outlandish experience with an alien. The alien encounter—as humorous as it is in the moment—is just a detour in an otherwise meandering journey. Johansson, to her credit, is phenomenal as a 1950s washed-up starlet, but the script never gives her anything to really work with beyond far-off looks and heavy doses of exposition.
Some of the meta-commentary is compelling, especially when applied to the way Wes Anderson seems locked within the cage of his own greatness. The cast of Asteroid City the play, which was penned by the “legendary” playwright Conrad Earp (Norton) provides no evidence that Earp is worthy of that sort of acclaim. The script seems just as disjointed and scattered as Anderson’s own film, which is further underscored by its’ star admitting that he doesn’t understand the play after over six hundred bows. On top of the cobbled-together feel of the play, with all of its melodramatic interplay, its director Schubert Green (Brody) has a seemingly random subplot which involves him having to live at the theater after his marriage falls apart. In juxtaposition to the writer’s own story, Green’s literal entrapment within the four walls of his stage conjures up interesting imagery when related back to Asteroid City’s own writer-director.
To add to the meta-commentary, in the latter half of the film, in a bizarre scene, Norton, Brody, and Willem Dafoe compel eager acting students to act out their strangest sleeping performance—complete with chanting. Allegedly it’s for a scene in Asteroid City, though it is never incorporated into the televised version, nor does it make sense with the story that half-heartedly unfolds. Though, with how mind-numbingly boring the film is, its own audience may be a shoo-in for the casting call. The film feels like a jumble of scenes from a handful of movies, all of which had the potential to be something unique and genuinely interesting.
Image via Focus Features
It is a shame that Asteroid City isn’t a better film, because Anderson has this brilliant ensemble of Tom Hanks, Tilda Swinton, Jeffery Wright, Maya Hawke, James Friend, Liev Schreiber, Hong Chau, and more, eating out of the palm of his hand. The younger cast of Sophia Lillis, Ethan Josh Lee, Jake Ryan, and Grace Edwards have a handful of very fun, stand-out moments, but with such a large ensemble and fragmented storytelling, most of that greatness is caught in the in-between.
Asteroid City ends relatively uneventfully, and perhaps—lost behind the aesthetics of itself—that was Anderson’s intention. Grief, like death, happens quite suddenly and mundanely. Here today and gone tomorrow. White Noise did this story better, however. Noah Baumbach’s film similarly explored the complex emotions wrapped up in death and grief, yet through the sudden, outlandish airborne toxic event (like the aliens in Asteroid City’s case) Baumach managed to find the struggling human soul within his characters, which Anderson seemingly cares very little about.
FINAL VERDICT: C
