I had the challenge of trying to describe Wes Anderson’s work to someone who had neither seen any of this movies or even heard of him. Quite frankly, I couldn’t do it very well without a good frame of reference. How do you explain Wes Anderson to someone who doesn’t see a lot of movies, and even when I named some of his better known ones, I got something of a blank look? About all I could say with some degree of confidence was that Bill Murray is in most of Anderson’s movies. That drew some recognition.
Then again, Murray actually isn’t in Anderson’s latest, Asteroid City. He might be the only one given the large cast of famous faces.
Asteroid City actually has multiple levels of narrative, but that’s not exactly new to Anderson. The movie opens in black-and-white as an unnamed television host (Bryan Cranston) informs the audience that his anthology TV show will be doing a production of the play Asteroid City as written by famous American playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). After some scenes of Earp’s going through the creative process, the movie slams into color to show the title location, exactly as described by Earp, and soon to be the sight of a Junior Stargazers award festival and scholarship contest. Among the contestants there’s young Woodrow Steenbeck (Jake Ryan), but he might be staying the small desert community a while longer as the family car died just before they arrived, causing his father, war photographer Augie (Jason Schwartzman), to put in a call to his father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks) to come get his three young daughters, but Augie hasn’t told his kids yet their mother died three weeks ago.
The other contestants and their parents and guardians, along with a country music band, various military types, and the scientists at the nearby observatory, all congregate in the small town, most notably movie star Midge Campbell (Scarlet Johansson) and her daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards). But then, the night of the awards show and during a celestial eclipse, an alien pops into view for a moment, putting the entire town under quarantine. Of course, the movie occasionally goes back to black-and-white to talk about the creative process Earp went though to produce his play, with multiple cast members in the play also playing the actors playing those characters, to say nothing of other eccentrics involved with behind-the-scenes work. Will anyone find anything of value in this whole thing?
Keeping in mind my efforts to describe Anderson’s work, I think it is safe to say that Asteroid City might not be the best Anderson movie to show to a newcomer. This is very much Anderson creating something for the people who already dig his work. I generally do, but this one didn’t work quite as well for me as his movie normally do. If anything, the framing device here goes a long way to explain the general artificial look that many of his movies have: it’s all a play. Or a TV show putting on the play. Or something. It’s a story within a story within a story. Anderson has done that before in The Grand Budapest Hotel, but it seems a little more estranged here when some actors play multiple characters.
But it’s still Anderson, and if you like what he does, you should like this. He has a large cast of famous faces for this one, though some like Margot Robbie and Jeff Goldblum are barely in the movie. The actors deliver their lines with the usual Anderson deadpan style, and it is the sort of movie where the characters don’t really get a happy ending, but they get a better ending than what they started off with. Ultimately, though, Anderson uses this 50s sci-fi setting to explore the creative process and maybe whether or not there’s a meaning to life. It just so happens to have an alien in it.
Grade: B-
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