Asteroid City (2023) | REVIEW

Directed by Wes Anderson — Screenplay by Wes Anderson — Story by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola.

Everyone who has ever seen one Wes Anderson film knows exactly what a Wes Anderson film looks like. His signature style has made him a lot of fans and admirers over the years, and it has also earned him some notable imitators. Nowadays, with the advent of AI, automatically generated images, and the like, a trend of recreating fake film trailers in the style of Wes Anderson has surfaced. You can now go online and find several videos hyping up fake Wes Anderson-style films with AI-generated images of well-known actors that don’t exactly look right (I even saw one for a fake American adaptation of the iconic Danish Olsen Gang films). With the emergence of such artificiality leading to so many conflicting emotions, might I suggest that you check out the real thing? Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s eleventh feature-length film, is well worth seeking out. As a matter of fact, I think it might be one of his best. 

This retro-futuristic film follows the Steenbeck family as they arrive early for a Stargazer convention in the middle of a desert. The father, a matter-of-fact war photographer Augie (played by Jason Schwartzman), is unsure of how to tell his children — three imaginative young girls and their older brother Woodrow (played by Jake Ryan), who is an unusually intelligent young man — that their mother has passed, but he eventually breaks the news to them as they settle into the small titular makeshift desert town. As other families join in, Woodrow finds other equally talented young minds including Dinah (played by Grace Edwards), the daughter of a well-known Hollywood actress, Midge Campbell (played by Scarlett Johansson), who Augie takes a liking to swiftly. That’s not all this is about, though, as the film has this nesting doll structure that also encompasses both the creation of a play and the live television broadcast of said play being narrated by a host played by Bryan Cranston. 

The play, i.e. the story revolving around the Steenbeck family, is presented in widescreen and heavily stylized colors. In contrast, the background elements (i.e. the creation of the play and the live broadcast) are shown in black-and-white and in Academy ratio. While it may sound like a lot to keep track of, Anderson’s film never bites off more than it can chew. The film is periodically structured by these stylized intertitles specifying which act we are in and what scenes we are seeing. While I suspect some people might find that in the process of watching the film they would have rather just have the colorful story without the black-and-white B-narratives, these are inseparable. Furthermore, as the film moves forward it becomes more and more clear that Wes Anderson is trying to connect the play, the creation thereof, stargazing, and the questions asked therein all for the purpose of highlighting age-old questions like “what is the meaning of life?” and “how do we move on when grief immobilizes us?” At the same time, it is also obvious that this was a film made during the COVID lockdown-era as Wes Anderson highlights quarantine living through distance and talking through windows as Augie’s primary method of communication with Midge. 

As you would expect, Asteroid City features all the visual style elements of a classic Wes Anderson film. His precision is always a sight to behold. Like always, there are gorgeously designed tableau shots, precise flat-space camera movements, and really satisfying symmetrical framing. In Asteroid City, the colors of the desert town are remarkably picturesque and almost cartoony in how sunbaked it all looks (the film also deserves a lot of praise for its charming buildings and landscapes). Later, as it becomes clear how this is really Wes Anderson’s version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the film is occasionally bathed in an intoxicating green light. It is a gorgeous film. 

Just like Anderson navigates his nestling doll-style film structure with charm, comedy, and ease, he also brings out the right energy of his ensemble cast which never overwhelms the picture. This is a crowded film with an A-list cast. Everyone from Tom Hanks and Scarlett Johansson to Steve Carell and Maya Hawke leave an impression. Jason Schwartzman and the incredibly well-cast Jake Ryan get the principal roles, and they both shine. Schwartzman lends a gravitas and a rising emotionality beneath the surface to certain scenes. He hasn’t been this good in a while, perhaps ever. Ryan — and the entire young and brainy cast — are really fun to watch, and Ryan just clicks into a classic Anderson role without ever delivering a false note. Maya Hawke is really fun to watch as this school teacher who is trying to update her instructions and lesson plan to the events her pupils witness during their excursion, and Liev Schreiber and Steve Carell both steal scenes. I genuinely could not imagine anyone other than Carell in his witty part, even though I think this was originally the role meant for Bill Murray who had to drop out of the production. Carell’s unique energy really gives something special to this film. 

Asteroid City snuck up on me. I expected it to be as stylized, charming, and witty as it is. But what I really warmed to about this multilayered Wes Anderson film was how it surprisingly carried this undercurrent of emotional heft to its themes. Only a select few Anderson films have managed to sweep me away on first viewing like Asteroid City has, and I suspect that my feelings about it will only become stronger with subsequent viewings as I become more informed on its depth. I found it to be an intensely rich film about grief, loss, and the meaning of life from the perspective of someone who may tend to look at life through the perspective of cinematic languages and structures, and this aspect of its metalanguage really spoke to me. 

9 out of 10

– Review Written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.