Review: Asteroid City

Director:  Wes Anderson

Stars:  Jason Schwartzman, Bryan Cranston, Jake Ryan

There has been a run, lately, of AI interpolations of Wes Anderson’s style, using it to approximate remakes of various other IP. What if he made Lord of the Rings? What if he did a Star War? etc. Initially a novelty, this has turned very quickly into a risible torrent of shit, and even good ol’ Wes has been moved to comment on his dislike of the idea. But what makes his style so readily open to mimicry by these algorithmic machines? Yes, he has a honed, perpetuated aesthetic with clear visual markers, but is there something more? Or something less? Something inherently missing in his mannered expressions that allows a cold, calculating piece of software to readily replicate him?

These are timely questions to coincide with the arrival of Asteroid City, Wes’ 11th picture and, one feels, his most determinedly detached from reality. He’s used framing devices and matryoshka story-telling techniques before. Hell, even as recently as the wonderful The French Dispatch. More so than previously they are implemented here to obstruct the viewer’s ability to connect to the material; to believe the lie. The story is framed as a play being produced and performed in three acts and does all it can to impinge upon our urge to lose ourselves in the telling. In the process Wes appears to be riffing on the hurdles and stumbling blocks of creativity. It is a story, effectively, of writer’s block, and it goes nowhere.

The brainchild of American playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), Asteroid City follows war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) as he ferries his brood of children across the desert to rendezvous with their grandfather Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks) at his California home. The family car breaks down in the titular dusty berg; a one horse town they are visiting so that Augie’s eldest, Woodrow (Jake Ryan), can compete in a science fair. Here we discover a microclimate of budding minds and their eclectic entourages, including Hollywood sensation Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson).

In a leaf torn quite notably from other Anderson pictures (most prominently Ben Stiller’s part in The Royal Tenenbaums), Augie is having trouble communicating to the children of their mother’s recent death, and nominally the film charts these early days of acceptance and reconciliation. A close encounter of the third kind locks everyone down in a military quarantine, freezing in place a road movie that had already come off the road.

Asteroid City is pitted with Anderson’s usual wit and cutesy charm – and that alien encounter ranks among one of his most enjoyably staged dalliances – and there are plenty of his oft-deployed robotic pans from tableaux to tableaux. Production design as fastidious as ever. All hallmarks to either revel in or bemoan, whichever takes your fancy. But the constant impulse to interrupt or undermine his own narrative irks no end. Intertitle cards are deployed to the nth degree, separating the film into not just acts but subsets of scenes (with an optional intermission card his among his laziest gags). Worse still are efforts to bust open his desert fantasy with elements of his monochrome wrap-around – the ‘real’ world in which the play is being staged. Our host (Bryan Cranston) gets so confused that he steps into a scene he’s not a part of. Played for laughs, its about as brutal a break in concentration as one could imagine.

These black and white sojourns into the gritty process of showing art are the real bones of Asteroid City and, one senses, the things Wes wants to talk about. Creativity, process, inspiration. But, peppered throughout his more playful and colourful fantasy (which touches on all these themes itself), they feel like unwelcome interruptions and their import or impressiveness is damaged. The point becomes fragmented, degraded.

Indeed, these scenes come to feel like little more than excuses for yet more cameos from Anderson’s ever-expanding stable of actor buddies (hi Willem!).

The huge roster of famous faces has been a big part of the promotional campaign for Asteroid City. That comically long list of stars. But there’s really only enough meat on the bones of this one for Schwartzman and Johansson (both of whom are great, by the way). Outside of the fleeting connection that grows between Augie and Midge (the nexus of which is alluded to but left out of the narrative), only Jake Ryan’s Woodrow gets much of a look-in. The rest of the cast are left to peep around the curtain. Most have only a line or two, delivered in monotone and at speed. Featureless, characterless, robotic, wasted. Tom Hanks feels like a big get, and a potentially significant newcomer to Wes Anderson’s stable, but he might as well not be here at all. The same goes, sadly, for Steve Carell, Matt Dillon and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her Hong Chau. More than ever this does feel like stunt casting. Increasingly empty and distracting gestures. Kudos to Jeffrey Wright and Tilda Swinton for wrestling something memorable out of their respective scraps.

When colourful it’s, err, colourful. But having brought his cadre of characters to a standstill, Wes struggles to get the engine revving again. Here, in the faltering middle and finale, one gains a measure of it’s creator’s love for creating, even when ideas run dry. Asteroid City is full of ideas, but they’re sketches. Doodles. It all feels so frustratingly incomplete. With so many interruptions and asides, maybe it’s simply harder to tell the wood from the trees.

I wonder, could an AI simulate such a scatological breakdown of purpose? Is there an algorithm for this much gentle chaos? Does a machine ever feel a little lost?