Years and years and years ago Wes Anderson made Bottle Rocket, a clever comedy about hapless crooks who are outwitted by a smarter crook. It was modest, unassuming, and confident, with excellent production design and cinematography and smart performances by the Wilson brothers and James Caan.
Flash forward three decades to Asteroid City, a leaden, overstuffed piece of whimsy about UFOs or something in the American Southwest. Or, if you belong to a certain school of critics, a brilliant take on existential dread. Anderson, like his followers, has swallowed the hype.
People do fall for Anderson’s affectless shtick, some over and over. Maybe it’s the kitsch, the pastels, the airless compositions, the insect-like line deliveries, the swirl of cultural allusions crowding every scene. Maybe Anderson’s followers identify as outsiders, underappreciated influencers, so-square-they’re-hipsters.
Me? I’m tired of complicated camera movements that end up meaning nothing. Or giant sets designed to look like giant sets. Or the Tinkertoy editing. Or talented actors reduced to speeding through clotted dialogue while trying not to emote.
I’m especially tired of Anderson’s attitude towards all this. When he played a Kinks song in The Darjeeling Limited, it complemented the narrative. Although weirdly out of place, it made sense. It didn’t feel ironic or snarky or cruel.
The Western themes in Asteroid City, on the other hand, are treated in a manner I find downright malicious. The starchy, too-tight clothes; the campfire putdowns; the pathetic hoedown — Anderson seems to hate everything about the West, from the endless horizons to the grit-covered picnic tables. When he sticks a distorted Slim Whitman singing his big hit “Indian Love Call” in the background of people bickering, he’s condemning it the same way cultural insiders mocked it for decades. Slim’s “weird,” and aren’t you cool for noticing?
And hey, how about all those call-outs to Warner Bros. animation? Not just the Road Runner landscapes. There’s that madcap chase, police speeding after a car, guns blazing, sirens howling, bisecting the frame and going nowhere. If you miss the joke the first time, you’ll get a few more chances to savor it because it’s an allusion! It’s punctuation! Maybe the West in that period just didn’t seem real. Maybe it was like a cartoon.
And all that mania about aliens! With the military and everything. Maybe that affected adults trying to have relationships, you know, people like movie stars and scientists and single dads who take photographs. Maybe that all means something.
In his best work Anderson seems attuned to adolescence, the push-and-pull of romance, the short but focused attention spans, the bewilderment over the larger world. Here the kids are snotty brats testing each other over pointless trivia.
Not that the parents are any better. Like their kids they’re terrified of sex, they resent authority, they have no answers. Wrap that up in cotton-candy colors and splash some mean-spirited music over it and you’ve got Asteroid City, a black hole of a movie that sucks pleasure right out of you.
Directed by Wes Anderson. Screenplay by Wes Anderson. Story by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola. Produced by Wes Anderson, Steven Rales, Jeremy Dawson. Director of Photography: Robert Yeoman, A.S.C. Production Designer: Adam Stockhausen. Film Editor: Barney Pilling, A.C.E. Additional Editor: Andrew Weisblum, A.C.E. Costume Designer: Milena Canonero. Music by Alexandre Desplat.
Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton.
Photo Courtesy of Roger Do Minh/Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features. ©2022 Pop. 87 Productions LLC
