The film is about being receptive to those unknowable elements, which in the Stargazer narrative are translated as a series of strange extraterrestrial events that lock the city’s inhabitants into a government-enforced quarantine. Asteroid City is about art’s ability to bridge emotional gaps, to offer language that even the creators or performers might not understand. I pondered the conceit for much of the movie, but just as the tale-within-the-tale starts to grow chaotic, Anderson drops the much-needed expositional hammer.
Why should the viewers also care that the story is apparently the conception of a dandy playwright named Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), who typed it up in a mountain cabin while cloaked in a smoking jacket? The Stargazer plot alone might have sufficed. The framing device initially feels superfluous to Asteroid City’s charming, Andersonian flow, in which adolescents deliver dialogue as droll and cutting as seasoned screwball comedians and every shot is gracefully arranged to the last pixel. The narrative twist, which Anderson establishes in the opening seconds, is that the entirety of the Stargazer storyline is a televised play, part of a hoary anthology show à la Playhouse 90, introduced by a cigarette-smoking announcer (Bryan Cranston) and presented in crisp black-and-white. Their respective teen children have their own chaste affair.
#Best window film for bathroom movie#
The writer-director (who conceived the story with Roman Coppola) explores his go-to themes of parenting, grief, and love blossoming in strange circumstances by way of a recently widowed war photographer named Augie Steenbeck (played by Jason Schwartzman), who falls for a movie star named Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson). Anderson is usually fond of a large ensemble, and he assembles one here to play the many families attending a junior “Stargazer convention” for enterprising teenage inventors. And it’s a reminder that Anderson remains one of cinema’s best.Īsteroid City is set at the dawn of the space age, in a mid-1950s American desert town built around an impact crater that doubles as a listening post to the stars. It pairs his inimitable visual elegance with an impassioned argument about the power of storytelling. His new film, Asteroid City, is a vigorous rebuke to that very critique. Isle of Dogs and The French Dispatch, in particular, seemed like charming, flimsy confections. But in the past decade or so, I struggled to excavate much deeper meaning beneath Anderson’s fine-tuned flair, and began to worry that he was disappearing inside his own eccentricities.
I’ve enjoyed the filmmaker’s work for many years-his methodical aesthetic, the subject of a thousand weak parodies, might be the most recognizable in moviemaking right now. I am here, hat in hand, to admit that I underestimated Wes Anderson.
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