I liked the premise of the movie Asteroid City. The narrator (Bryan Cranston) tells the story, in black-and-white, of the world-famous fictional play. It’s partly about a grieving father (Jason Schwartzman as Augie Steenbeck) taking his tech-obsessed teenage son (Jake Ryan as Woodrow) to a science competition in the middle of nowhere. Woodrow’s three curious (in every sense of the word) younger sisters are also there.
Then Something Happens to upend everyone’s worldview.
The look of Asteroid City’s bland pastel color desert setting was very effective. But the film left me confounded. I understand that it evokes Area 51 paranoia, Sputnik fear, and the meta-stress of actors forgetting their lines.
Yet I didn’t care enough. Rex Reed wrote: “Like all Wes Anderson movies, it is enigmatic, artificial, infuriatingly self-indulgent, and irrevocably pointless.” Rex Reed is wrong.
I’ve been a big fan of the works of the writer/director. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Moonrise Kingdom (2012), and Isle of Dogs (2018), even 2/3s of The French Dispatch (2021) I enjoyed.
Adam Graham of the Detroit News suggested: “It’s all very cute but not much else, as the story remains locked inside Anderson’s dollhouse and is inaccessible to all but his most ardent fans.” That’s possibly true.
Too much
The review that nailed it for me was by Prabhjot Bains of the Hollywood Handle. He wrote: “It feels like two different movies forcefully amalgamated into one incongruous whole, rendering its existential meditation on grief emotionally inert and hollow… It’s very much Anderson’s weakest entry to date.” That’s probably it.
There are a lot of concepts stuffed into the film, with scads of performers, many of whom have been in previous Anderson films, plus Tom Hanks, as the cranky grandfather, who I’d not seen in an Anderson film before.
Even the positive review by Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle notes: “Anderson’s lone indulgence is to cast famous faces in extremely minor roles… Jeff Goldblum has one line… Matt Dillon has a single small scene and spends the rest of the movie standing around. This is distracting, and Anderson certainly does it as another distancing device, reminding audiences that this is all artifice, that it’s only a movie. But… it’s hard not to see their casting as the director’s ego trip, his showing off how many big-name actors are willing to take any role in one of his movies.”
I so wanted to like this film, but alas, alas, it was more effort than enlightenment.
