Asteroid City

A new Wes Anderson film is always something to celebrate as, in a sea of big studio films and decisions by committee, you know you’re going to get an Auteur’s vision, sprinkled with impeccable detail on an original story.

Asteroid City is very much this but, unfortunately, perhaps goes a little too far down the visionary route to a point where it’ll certainly alienate (pun intended, given the film’s subject) the non-converts out there.

This story-within-a-story surrounds a playwright and a performance of his latest piece. Juxtaposing black and white and glorious pastel colour to split the two narratives makes everything look rather lovely but the character incursions and the flurry of bit parts and ‘actors playing actors playing characters’ doesn’t half make things confusing.

It feels like there should be some grand moment which coalesces both segments and brings them together. Some truth or poignancy and whilst there are plays for this, they don’t quite come off. Ostensibly a film about the ‘wonder of life’ (or perhaps just a big Covid metaphor, who knows) Anderson keeps things vague and oblique when it comes to the answers.

No doubt this is intentional but it is distracting when you’re trying to enjoy the absolutely stunning visuals. Make no mistake, this is a truly beautiful film: the Anderson ‘letterbox’ style perfectly matching the 50’s aesthetic of the desert town its set in.

It’s a wondrous thing to behold and, as you’d expect, the music is a perfect match and the absolutely stacked cast is quite unbelievable (stacked like you wouldn’t believe – with actors you’d usually see topping casts given tiny amounts of screentime: Tom Hanks, Steve Carrell, Margot Robbie and Jeff Goldblum (who gets just the one line) to name a few.)

Painfully though, style over substance to a fault might just be the most common consensus here and it's, rather ironically, almost a stereotype of what people imagine Anderson's films to be like. It’s a shame as there are some wonderful jokes, characters and the crux of an interesting story just slightly too muddled, melodramatic and obtuse for its own good.

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