Asteroid City film review — Wes Anderson’s mid-life story brims with bittersweet truths

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Is Wes Anderson OK? The question is prompted in the usual high style by his new movie Asteroid City: the 11th feature film of a major American director now unnerved by the cosmos. An Anderson sceptic might suggest you’d have an existential crisis too if you’d made the same film 11 times. But even haters will miss him when he’s gone. Sometimes my eyes rolled too. Then, the more I saw of the movie, the more I came to look at it differently. Like life, you could say.

Naturally, the Anderson of it all is front and centre: geometry, small print, quote marks round quote marks. The outer box is a pastiche black-and-white TV show, our host (Bryan Cranston) arriving with a hint of The Twilight Zone. The show in turn concerns a postwar playwright, Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), working with a troupe of actors. Their creation makes up the core of the film: the Matryoshka’d tale of the title, set in a tiny desert resort town. The year is 1955. The cast runs to a ludicrous number of Hollywood notables, most but not all Anderson regulars: Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Jeffrey Wright, Margot Robbie, many more. Is the director hobbling bad reviews by making critics use up their word count to fit in mention of Rupert Friend?

Now what? Another good question. The simple answer is that the cast squeeze into a production design just-so even for Anderson. There are bleached-out blues and dazed peach-oranges. Shirts match the sunsets. Yeah yeah, you think. Then you pause and realise: actually, this looks incredible. 

Next comes a fractured dot-dash of plot lines, wrapped around a bunch of “junior stargazers”, here with their parents. Anderson gives special focus to a widowed war photographer (Jason Schwartzman) and a celebrated movie star, played by Scarlett Johansson. The latter is terrific, seamlessly on top of the brisk deadpan Anderson mandates. Don’t take that for granted either: in his first film with the director, Tom Hanks sounds like a man struggling with Duolingo.

Then the film hits the brakes. Asteroid City is sealed off: static. Under the desert sun, no one would blame you for wearying of the piquant little exchanges in this loaded place and timeframe. (Nuclear tests dot the background; a Wes Anderson mushroom cloud looks exactly as you’d think.) With no obvious through line, we slip in and out of the framing devices. Back with Conrad Earp, his actors fret that they don’t understand the play. Somewhere off-screen, an Anderson-phobe screams.

But what it means is there in plain sight. If Anderson has always relied on the kindness of studio executives, he also has great timing: his tightly branded, hyper-stylised films suit an age when young audiences see that much as only natural. (Anderson parodies are all over TikTok.) He tells stories about clever kids; the kids love him back.

And yet Asteroid City is a mid-life story to the bones. Anderson is 54, with a seven-year-old child, and the movie is suffused with bittersweet truths immune to framing devices. Your children will go their own way; people you care for will die. Also: generally speaking, no one really understands the play. 

If that sounds chilly, the film can be. But Asteroid City ends up speaking with the odd, tender directness of his best work. Only connect, we are reminded, a message made literal in a brief, wildly charming scene with yet another Anderson veteran: Jeff Goldblum, closely encountering a co-star with what might be matching cameras. The moment is fleeting, but long enough for a flash of real profundity. Hopefully we get to say the same of life.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from June 23 and in US cinemas now