Anderson’s script, which he wrote with Roman Coppola, is the opposite of naturalistic. Typically, screenwriters walk a line between making their dialogue as natural as possible and having their characters say exciting and profound things that we rarely say in our everyday conversations. But Anderson is not interested in naturalism at all. His dialogue is clipped and absurd. I can’t imagine the actors are given the freedom to improvise in Anderson’s films: Every aspect of them - and Asteroid City is no exception - is meticulously curated.
Though set in the American West, the film was shot on farmland in Spain. They built the entire set - including a train station, gas station, diner and motel - on an expansive piece of flat land, even bringing in tonnes of dirt to cover the ground for miles around in the specific orange colour palette Anderson was looking for. As with the dialogue, his sets aren’t interested in realism. The town looks like a diorama and it is no exaggeration to say that every single shot could be framed and hung on your wall.
When I was a kid, I used to entertain myself by moving chess pieces around a chess board into various formations. I thought I was choreographing a great ballet or something. This film feels a lot like Anderson’s doing the same thing - like he’s built himself a miniature town on a life-size scale, and he’s moving hugely famous actors around into precise positions where he films them saying their precise line, delivered entirely sans emotion, before picking them up and moving them to their next spot.
It’s not narratively fulfilling - in fact it’s so affected I had to force myself to really concentrate to understand the story at all - but boy is it fun to watch. It’s like getting to see Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Margot Robbie and the rest in a quirky and beguiling contemporary dance performance that you know has some underlying meaning, but no one really cares what it is.
HE SAW
Once again, a Wes Anderson film forces us to confront the same old questions: Is this too twee, too contrived? Is the whole Andersonian project played out – the story too thin, the framing too self-conscious, the actors’ monotones too monotonous?
Ultimately, it all boils down to one question: Is this pissing you off yet? If you are able to answer no, for the full duration of any given Anderson movie, you become part of an exclusive – and surely ever-shrinking – club.
To like the oeuvre of Anderson, more than that of any other director working today, is to mark yourself out as a certain type of person – the type of person who uses the word “oeuvre”.
To join the club of Anderson-lovers requires sacrifice: The sacrifice of relationships with people who don’t have the time or inclination to listen to windy, self-regarding diatribes about story bifurcation and the narrative use of colour.
As someone who has long hewed to a belief that Anderson is a genius, and who cannot imagine ever seeing Rushmore displaced from its position as one of history’s three greatest movies, it is with a sense of sadness that I must now say: “Enough.”
In Asteroid City, the story is too thin, the self-consciousness is too self-conscious, and who is the butt of the joke when one assembles cinema’s greatest array of acting talent and then forbids them from expressing human emotion? There are many possible answers but it’s hard to go past “the audience”.
Still, whether you love or hate the Anderson aesthetic, you have to admire it. You can feel the anguished hours he’s put into the painstaking construction of every single shot, such that it’s a miracle he’s finished even a single film, let alone 11.
Like all his movies, Asteroid City is a feature-length collection of shots that qualify as works of art, but how long can you stand in front of a painting, even a masterpiece, before you start looking at your watch?
Every good film-maker needs someone to ask them, about every shot, every scene, every line and every film: what is the point?
If there is any point in being human, it’s to use the talents we have been given, and there’s no doubt Anderson is one of the most talented film-makers of our time. The real challenge is to use your talent in the service of something. In Asteroid City, that something feels a lot like nothing.
Asteroid City is in cinemas now.
