(courtesy IMP Awards)
If you head into Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s latest retro pastel-toned opus expecting a coherent story and a hard-hitting message-rich narrative you may be disappointed.
That’s not to say it’s lacking in either of those two things; in fact, as storytellers go, Anderson is very good at saying a lot while saying very little, a skill that has seen him accuse, unfortunately, of being more interested in style over substance.
But in terms of other films like The Grand Budapest Hotel which went hard and deep and inventively expansive on its narrative reach, Asteroid City is a slight will-o-the-wisp deal which does have things to say on grief, loss and the innocence of old assumptions rent asunder but which does it in a way that prioritises the ebullient cinematic playfulness for which the director is rightly renowned.
Set in the 1950s at a strange town way out in the desert where nuclear tests are so routine as to elicit little to no interest, save for accidentally newly arrived in town photographer, Augie (Jason Schwartzman) who captures the test, as he does with everything, graphically and with a patient attention to detail and art and where roadrunners, in a running gag, mischievously tempt an out-of-sight coyote to come after them.
It’s a town to nowhere really and all of the vast ensemble cast, including Tilda Swinton as a scientist studying the heavens, Tom Hanks as Augie’s father-in-law Stanley and Liev Schrieber as J. J. Kellogg are there through happenstance and nothing more, and only end up marooned when something quite remarkable takes place, necessitating a lockdown by the military and everyone’s enforced temporary residence.
Augie is really the focus of both the story that unfolds in the town, which is on the up-and-up if you believe the endlessly upbeat motel owner played by Steve Carell who’s trying to sell residential plots to anyone who will listen.
He is caught in a web of very recent grief, with the death of his beloved wife only three weeks old, and he’s on his way to leave his four kids including precocious Junior Stargazer (seems like an astronomical riff on the Scouts) eldest Woodrow (Jake Ryan) with Stanley who doesn’t like, and has never liked, his son-in-law but who sees a kindred spirit, for now at least, in a fellow human being caught in painful loss.
Augie has yet to tell his children their mother, her ashes in very Wes Anderson-style sealed in a Tupperware container, is dead and so the unexpected stopover in Asteroid City gives the chance to confess to his kids that their mother is no more – his daughters are quirky weird and quite possibly one of the best things about the film – and to start over by starting a sort of relationship with A-List star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansoon) whose daughter Dinah (Mercedes Ford) is also a Junior Stargazer and smitten with the hilariously awkward, notepad-jotting Woodrow.
In a sense that it has any theme at all, Asteroid City is about moving on after innocence and a sense of safety and security has been ruptured; Augie has to grapple, like so many characters with where he goes from here and the events of the film give him a chance to let off some steam, talk things over and realise that there are bigger things than his life at play.
Confusing things more than a little is the deliciously meta layered storyline where concurrent with the events in the desert town, a play written by revered playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and directed by Schubert Green (Adrien Brody) is running that mirrors the story in the movie overall.
The actors move between the Bryan Cranston-narrated play in black and white, and the colour-drenched main story with alacrity, a blurring of what’s real and what’s not that gets even more murky, in a thoroughly charming and trademark Anderson idiosyncratic fashion, when the two stories diverge from and reference each other to advance their respective narratives.
It’s a gloriously confusing mix of the real and the imagined with the colour version of the story ostensibly the lived-out version of the play, for which we are treated to all kinds of amusing, overly dramatic behind-the-scenes action, which seeks to tell the story of what happens to people when their lives, albeit temporarily upside down.
Slight as it might be on a narrative and emotional level, Asteroid City has a vivacious, soul-reviving buoyancy to it, a sense that even when life is terrible or unexpected things happen, that people have a remarkable ability to take it all in and keep moving on.
Not necessarily easily of course and if there’s one thing Asteroid City does well is it understands and demonstrates that curveballs can really throw people for massive, life-disrupting loops, but they can handle way more than even likely think they can.
What really marks this film as something special is that it has a lot of fun telling the story it tells; it has enough emotional muscularity to lend it enough weight that it doesn’t float off into the frothy ether but it is also just as happy to throw in a plethora of site gags such as the aforementioned roadrunner, a freeway overpass that goes nowhere, and the robber/police car chase that goes back and forth through town for no accountable reason and at the oddest times.
While anyone reviewing a movie wants to know why it exists and what it’s trying to say, it’s enough much of the time that Asteroid City just exists.
It’s vividly light, bright and fun, and while it does have some pithy things to say about the human condition, it is just as much a stylistic retro jump saturated in pastels and nostalgia that knows the weirdest and sometimes best things can happen in the most improbably ways and at the strangest times, and that life can be informed by them and moved on anyway and that maybe it all means something or nothing.
Who knows really but one thing we can be sure of is that Wes Anderson can fashion visually quirky nothing into a delightful something that might defy full comprehension but which leaves you feeling oddly good about the world outside, and honestly when everything’s as much of a mess as it is now, that can only ever be seen as a gift.