Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, 2023) (Patreon)

I changed my mind just a bit on this one, going back and watching a few key scenes after I'd come away with a mostly favorable impression. And although I do have very mixed feelings about Asteroid City, I have no trouble comprehending the fact that some longtime Wes-watchers feel that this is his best film in years, if not ever. If, as the memes and SNL sketches contend, "Wesworld" is a quantifiable element, then in many respects Asteroid City is bursting with Wes flavor, maybe the most Wessed out picture he's made so far.

If I were inclined to deconstruct Asteroid City, I might begin with the title. The film is premised on a play about a fictional town in the American Southwest that grew up around a softball-sized rock from outer space. The ultimate MacGuffin, the asteroid doesn't leave much of a physical impression when compared with, say, Crater Lake. Instead of a village centered on an absence, Asteroid City is centered on a rather unimpressive presence, the absence of an absence. There's no there there, but neither is there any not there.

In terms of art direction, Asteroid City is without a doubt Anderson's most beautiful film, and at the same time his most overtly artificial. Using the wraparound concept of a play which is being performed for a television show, Asteroid City's main plot unfolds in a literally painted desert, with theatrical flats designed not to imply depth, as in trompe l'oeil, but to imply the implication of depth, to circle around realism while adamantly refusing it. (The black and white sequences depicting the behind-the-scenes orchestration of the play are only just slightly more convincing.) Most young people will see Asteroid City and think of Pixar's Cars, but really Anderson has constructed a sort of Edward Hopper / Georgia O'Keeffe rendition of Chuck Jones' "Roadrunner" cartoons.

So far so good. Asteroid City, while consistently diverting and frequently genuinely funny, is itself a film organized around a gaping hole. Even in Anderson's most fanciful projects, like The Grand Budapest Hotel and Fantastic Mr. Fox, there is some bedrock set of ideas and themes, something at stake. Beneath, or perhaps alongside the whimsy, these films had thoughts about the fate of liberalism in Europe, or the struggle between instinct and civilization. Asteroid City doesn't care about aliens, or Cold War science, or even its own meta-theatrical structure. It's all empty pretext.

For a moment, I thought maybe this was Anderson's roundabout way of making a Covid film, since the government forces a quarantine and a lot of people with very little in common were stuck together for an indefinite period of time. But like every notion Asteroid City presents to us -- the Junior Star Gazers, the social difficulties of gifted children, the attempt to manage grief through rationality, the trap of celebrity -- this too is merely grazed, never taken seriously. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining that Anderson didn't make some grand statement film. But this is a movie with ADHD, one with more characters and more plot strands than its makers can competently manage. Major actors are wasted in Asteroid City (especially Tilda Swinton and Tom Hanks) because Wes wanted them in his movie and only later on thought to give them something to do. The whole enterprise is like a school play (cf. Rushmore) when you're stuck with a script that has 13 roles but you have 17 students to cast. 

I feel awkward complaining that Asteroid City is all form and virtually no content. This should warm the cockles of my formalist heart. But why make a narrative film at all, if your narrative is going to feel like such an afterthought? Anderson has gotten smacked down for half-baked ideas in the past (The Life Aquatic, which I liked, and The Darjeeling Limited, which I mostly didn't). But this is the first time I watched a Wes Anderson film and, for better or worse, saw only a director playing with the biggest electric train set a boy ever had. It was fun, but it didn't go anywhere.