JASON SCHWARTZMAN AND TOM HANKS IN ASTEROID CITY

TRAILER

"...to see this sui generis Amerindie star fall to earth with a resounding thud, leaving just a stunningly designed and studiously empty hole in its wake, is a cosmic bummer"

As David Fear, quoted above, notes in his review of his new film Asteroid City, Wes Anderson has done both better and worse: but nonetheless the movie's failure to delight us is a particular disappointment. There's something dispiriting, nullifying, about it. This starts with the distracting images. Intensely pastel, yet uniformly bleached-out looking, they swallow everything and everybody up. You have to almost squint to make out details of the typically busy mise-en-scene. And this happens to the people too. They disappear, all those usual famous actors becoming unusually difficult to recognize.

Asteroid City isn't a city but a blip in the desert. And what it's named for is actually a meteorite the size of a hand ball that fell millennia ago and is kept on display near the large crater it originally created. Considering all the emotion and affection that led Wes to the reinvented France and lovingly spun out magazine of The French Dispatch, his last film, it's harder to see what drew him to this desert place. That is, if it is a place at all, which is a big question. We are brought here, apparently, because his weekend members of the military and astronomers have gathered to welcome five gifted children, come in turn to present their inventions.

Actually, it's not a place at all really, Asteroid City, but the outgrowth - somehow - of a stage play written by Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), whose creative labors are described to us by a narrator (Bryan Cranston). This from Anthony Lane's description in The New Yorker: "How, precisely, the film locks into the play, why we first see the play on a TV monitor, and whether it’s the same play that is overseen by a debonair director, Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), are narrative niceties that must await clarification from viewers much smarter than me." And much, much smarter than me. And this is important, it is central, and without it we have only color, and cute details like forty-cent milkshakes and mushroom clouds in the not-so-distant background not seen as a threat but steps toward progress. And the flying saucer descending to unload a tall, skinny alien (as elegant an alien as you'll ever see) to rapidly steal the famous local meteorite and quickly depart, returning equally quickly to put it back, having catalogued it - as boring an alien invasion as you're likely to see. What is the point of this movie: grief, and shared trauma, as unified in Augie and Midge? Fascination with false and naive futures in the Fifties fetishizing of space? Aliens? Or all these, plus the worlds-within-worlds of creative invention of creative invention? But what makes all this fit together into this plastic, pastel swirl?

Lane describes the action, or characters, of this typically cunningly crafted and richly detailed but this time totally off-putting film. The two main characters are a war photographer, Augie Steenbeck (a bearded and almost unrecognizably filled-out and matured Jason Schwartzman), grieving for his late wife, whose ashes he carries in a Tupperware bowl, accompanied by his teenage son, Woodrow (Jake Ryan); and a movie star, Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), who's sad too, from many malign treatments by men. The two connect, as do Woodrow and Midge's daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards). Augie also has a chattering mini-chorus of daughters, by the way, and a station wagon that has broken down, or exploded, and is ministered to by a mechanic played by Matt Dillon. (Midge is supposed to dazzle everyone around; but I didn't see that so much.)

There are lots of other characters, but they don't stand out. In fact they fade into each other, and the famous actors playing them disappear into their makeup and costumes and the pastel look that swallows everything up. Okay, one does recognize some, such as Tom Hanks, as Stanley Zak, as Augie's solid and stolid father-in-law. And Jeffrey Wright, as General Gibson, the host of the Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention: this all takes place in 1955, and that is something that makes sense to us, even if we are consuming cliches of the period: the sense that mushroom clouds are friendly, the naive enthusiasm for space travel. And one soon spots Tilda Swinton, playing Dr. Hickenlooper, a lecturer quite reminiscent of the American art authority J.K.L. Berensen she played in The French Dispatch.

Ah, but The French Dispatch ! What nostalgia one feels for that last Wes Anderson film, how one sought it out at a remote provincial cinema, and saw it again with friends, with enthusiasm, to know more, and more, and more about it. Sadly, that enthusiasm has failed to ignite this time.

Why?

Well, its failure to ignite would seem due primarily to the artificiality of the setting and subject matter, which feel rather like a high school science project undertaken many, many, many decades ago. It all feels rather far also from Wes, who comes from Houston, and lives in Paris - and from us. But also the enigmatic structure of the piece, the little busy world in an unreal desert - "Are those genuine roads, leading out of Asteroid City," Anthony Lane asks, "and do they stretch to an actual horizon?" - and its relationship to the intellectualized black and white theatrical setting ("How, precisely, the film locks into the play"). It is possible actually to spend minutes of watching Asteroid City and understanding nothing, of fading out, like watching a Polish movie with Greek subtitles (if you're not Polish or Greek).

Can one learn the language? Has one the stamina to try? Lane hints to appreciate Asteroid City one may need to do homework. I haven't done enough, and with further study there will, or would, be greater understanding. But in the simple test of pleasure on first big-screen watch, it has forever failed. And it failed for the movie-lover and Wes-fan friend I went to see it with as well.

Asteroid City, 104 mins., debuted in competition at Cannes May 23, 2023. Limited US theatrical release from Jun. 13, 2023. Screened for this review at Kabuki Cinema, San Francisco Jun. 24, 2023. Metacritic rating: 75%. In the IMDb ratings of all Wes Anderson's films, it is at the bottom, #11 (but I don[t agree with all the rankings).

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.