It’s a small place in the middle of nowhere but true to its name, Asteroid City does not lack for stardust. It does lack something that makes it one of the great Wes Anderson movies though, like the love triangle in Rushmore, the runaway kids in Moonrise Kingdom, the family dysfunction in The Royal Tenenbaums.
This, though, is just another Anderson comedy of mannerisms. One which the fan club – and those who have made his arch vibe and visual style a thing on TikTok and Instagram – will love. And you almost have to admire it for the vast cast that Anderson has assembled like some impossible but lovingly decorated tier cake.
Among those playing visitors and residents to the meteor crater tourist town somewhere in the US southwest are Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Tom Hanks, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Liev Schreiber and many more.
And that’s just the desert pastel-coloured part of Anderson’s grand confection, which is also a paean to 1950s sci-fi, and other great inventions of the era – TV drama, Tupperware and hydrogen bombs. Yes, after Oppenheimer, I am sure I am not the only one thinking that you wait all your life for a movie with varying projection ratios and nuclear explosions and, fancy that, two come along at once.
There’s a whole other layer of stardust in cathode ray tube black and white. Anderson, who has always had a gift for rubbing theatricality up against movie naturalism in interesting ways, has framed Asteroid City within – and yes, it’s complicated but completely undemanding – as the film of a play written for television.
That section has its own backstage scenes. They involve a whole other cast only getting a line or three. Let’s call it a cameo cream of Margot Robbie, Adrien Brody, Edward Norton, Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe and yes, many more. Plus Bryan Cranston as a Rod Serling host-announcer.
So yes, the gang’s all here and they’ve brought their kids. It’s led by Anderson fixture Jason Schwartzman and Johansson who appear in both and provide much of the movie’s quirky romantic heart. Bill Murray? He got Covid, so Carell was subbed in as the Asteroid City motelier and real estate agent selling parcels of dirt and martinis out of vending machines.
Johansson is Midge Campbell, a famous actress with an Elizabeth Taylor-ish hauteur, who has brought her bright daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards) to the town’s space cadet conference.
So too has Schwartzman’s war photographer, who has arrived with his genius son, his three younger daughters and that Tupperware container of his recently deceased astronomer wife’s ashes. His cranky father-in-law (Hanks) eventually turns up too.
But the conference is interrupted by a cosmic incident and put under military quarantine. Meanwhile back in TV land, playwright (Norton) and Schwartzman’s actor are falling in love, between scenes that seem bigger on footnotes (there’s a nod to On the Waterfront among others) than they are on coherence.
Though they do help make Asteroid City one heck of a kitset of many moving parts. It’s an assemblage to be admired, enjoyed, then quickly forgotten.
Asteroid City, directed by Wes Anderson, in cinemas now.
