Asteroid City movie review: Wes Anderson’s picture framed Theatre of the Absurd

Wes Anderson’s latest is yet another highly stylized narrative of cosmic significance. Read more to find out why

Film: Asteroid City
Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody
Director: Wes Anderson
Rating: 3/5
Runtime: 105 min.

Wes Anderson’s latest is yet another highly stylized narrative of cosmic significance. It’s hard for the general audience to get emotionally connected with Anderson’s stories but there’s plenty of goodies to be had in the framing, visual design, and poignance with which he narrates his multi-pronged stories. “Asteroid City,” his latest collaboration with cinematographer Robert Yeoman, is certainly wondrously beautiful to look at.

This film opens in documentary format, black-and-white, circa 1955, in the United States of America, narrated by Bryan Cranston, who tells the story of the theatrical “Asteroid City,” in which some of the key figures are a fictional playwright named Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody). Earp’s play is set at a remote Western meteor crash site hosting a Space Camp in which several scholastically gifted teens are presenting futuristic inventions.

Anderson basically strands a bunch of people in a tiny fictitious desert town in the American Southwest with a population of 87, isolating them thereafter an alien encounter. Military quarantine has obviously been imposed. Woodrow (Jake Ryan) is the oldest son of war photographer Augie Steenback (Jason Schwartzman). He finds affinity with Dinah (Grace Edwards), the daughter of Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a movie star. Ricky Cho (Ethan Josh Lee), Clifford Kellogg (Aristou Meehan), and other characters with odd traits round up the rest of the distinctive young personalities here. The human drama that enfolds the Asteroid City portion of the film, finds Augie, his father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks), and the Steenback children, negotiating with awful grief in their own ways. All of the film’s action revolves around love, comedy, and precocious geniuses - and everyone careers around the existential question, What is the meaning of life?Anderson’s stories usually get lost in the visual extraordinariness of his play. The painstakingly designed framing and camera movement, plots that confuse and embolden, and mannered performances that enhance the manicured enchantment of Anderson’s visual repertoire - all contribute to an enchanting exercise in artifice that could well eke the joy out of the experience or make his signature story-telling style seem much more…depends entirely on the viewer’s discretion!

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