Asteroid City
Wes Anderson explores themes of grief and riffs on Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind in Asteroid City, which is among the richest films of his career
The sleepy desert town of Asteroid City has its fair share of oddities. There’s the science research centre smack-bang in the middle of nowhere, an unfinished motorway ramp built stretching a measly few feet into the sky, and its namesake: an enormous crater left thousands of years ago by debris crashing from outer space. For Wes Anderson’s 11th film, the ever-inventive director takes this relatively empty canvas to explore grief, existentialism, and aliens for one of his richest films to date.
Asteroid City’s population of 87 temporarily grows when a group of intrepid young scientists are invited to the town to collect an award. Among them is Woodrow (Jake Ryan, even more of a scene-stealer than he was scoffing chicken nuggets in Eighth Grade), who’s arrived with his father and his three sisters in a rickety car that breaks down on arrival. Afraid of upsetting his kids, patriarch Augie (Jason Schwartzman) has yet to tell them that their mother passed away just three weeks ago.
Since The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson has become increasingly daring with his framing devices, and in Asteroid City, he positions the viewer as a television audience watching a programme about the creation of a play set in the titular locale. Anderson cuts back from black-and-white to vibrant colour that mimics the feeling of sunshine bearing down on you in parallel storylines about the events of the play and its behind-the-scenes drama. Though disorienting at first, the device cleverly blurs the lines between performance and reality, as the ensemble troupe of actors absorb their characters’ hopes and fears.
If you’re terminally online, you may have noticed the frustrating scourge of AI-generated remakes imagining classic films in Anderson’s style. In the director’s Star Wars, a perfectly centrally-placed X-wing sits in a pastel Death Star, and in his version of Hogwarts, Timothée Chalamet plays Harry Potter. Beyond the mind-numbing absence of creativity, these pastiches reduce his work to lifeless paintings, perfectly symmetrical frames and, well, that’s about it. There’s a willful misunderstanding of who he is as a filmmaker.
The beauty of Wes Anderson is that, with every film, he breaks out of the confines of his supposed rulebook. A meeting with an extra-terrestrial sets the foundations for some of Anderson’s most awe-inspiring images to date, mixing live-action, miniatures and animation in a sequence that evokes Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. When word reaches the military of the alien visit, Asteroid City goes into lockdown, inviting the locals to, paradoxically, reflect and look outward. In that sense, this is the closest Anderson may come to making a pandemic drama, as a series of wistful conversations between Augie and movie star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) speak to the perennial longing for connection in isolation.
Contrary to popular belief, Anderson’s films also carry a deep emotional complexity, their beautiful images masking the pain that characters attempt to conceal. Loss and tragedy permeate Asteroid City. Augie’s encounters with the terrifying unknowns of grief and the limitless universe go hand-in-hand. Beneath the cosmic wonder of Anderson’s luminous world is something painfully, humanly close to home.
Asteroid City had its world premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival; in UK cinemas 23 Jun via Universal, certificate TBC