Asteroid City is a Goddamned Masterpiece

I love Wes Anderson!

Get this for me and I will be your best friend!

I understand why some people HATE Wes Anderson and his films. He is, after all, a filmmaker with an incredibly distinctive aesthetic. He has a strong personality as an auteur that rubs some folks the wrong way for various reasons, justified and otherwise. 

The knock on Anderson is that he makes the same movie over and over again with only minor variations and that those films are twee, precious, pretentious, divorced from reality and impossibly full of themselves. 

While I understand that line of criticism I do not think it is justified because in my mind and the minds of people like me Wes Anderson is an artist and that’s what auteurs do: they develop a trademark style that they refine and perfect over the course of their careers. 

At Asteroid City we sell asteroids…And that’s all!

With Wes Anderson, it was love at first sight for me. Watching his scruffy, low-budget directorial debut Bottle Rocket I experienced one of the most exciting elements of being a pop culture writer: the thrill of discovery. 

I knew then and there that Anderson was something special and even though he was VERY young he knew exactly what he wanted to do creatively and how to realize those ambitious, audacious aspirations. 

I was even more blown away by Rushmore, which rocketed to the top of my list of all-time favorite films. I did not realize it at the time but Anderson’s follow-up, The Royal Tenenbaums, was even better. 

I even own one of Richie Tenenbaum’s tennis trophies, a film used prop I bought on Bay. 

With Anderson it’s not a question of whether his movies will be good or bad but rather if they’ll be towering masterpieces that will stand the test of time and less great movies that still have a lot going for them. 

Anderson is not a terribly prolific filmmaker and I stopped following his new work when I stopped being a film critic in 2015. 

That means that Asteroid City is the first new Anderson movie I have seen in almost ten years, since 2014’s masterful The Grand Budapest Hotel. 

Watching Asteroid City with my eight year old son Declan I fell instantly back in love with Anderson. It all came rushing back to me. It was like eating a food you love but haven’t eaten for a long time. You find yourself wondering why you don’t regularly avail yourself of something that makes you deliriously happy when it can be a part of your everyday life.

My son was less impressed. He has precociously sophisticated tastes and loves costumes and art and music so I hoped he would respond well to Anderson’s aesthetic. I would have been better off starting with something like The Fantastic Mr. Fox or Isle of Dogs because Asteroid City was way too adult, arty and dry for him. 

Also I think the film employs way too many Brechtian distancing techniques for a child whose taste in films runs more towards early Tim Burton movies and Across the Spider-Verse. 

I hoped that Asteroid City being a science fiction movie would make it more appealing to him but I must confess that the movie is extremely light on space aliens but represents Anderson in his purest, most potent form. 

For reasons I can’t begin to understand Anderson posits Asteroid City as a televised production of a fictional play of the same name by playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). 

The film intermittently pulls the curtain back to chronicle the production’s behind-the-scenes workings and we see characters as the fictional actors playing them rather than as their fictional selves. 

If that sounds complicated, convoluted and headache-inducing then you will be relieved to know that you do not need to care about the framing device to enjoy the film. You just need to dig what Wes Anderson is doing because, if I might give Asteroid City some very high praise, it is VERY Wes Andersony. For some folks, specifically people with bad taste who hate beauty, whimsy and art, that might pose a big problem. For me it’s a massive strength. 

Asteroid City takes place in a retro-futuristic 1955. War photographer Augie Steenbeck travels to the titular locale for the Junior Stargazer convention, a meeting of precocious brainiacs that includes his own fiercely intelligent genius son Dudley (Jake Ryan). 

Anderson loves stories about spookily, uncannily gifted children because in some ways he himself never stopped being a spookily, uncannily gifted child himself. 

Excessive intelligence is a curse rather than a blessing in this world. These kids are so smart that it’s downright spooky. Their brilliance alienates them from the rest of the world and from each other as well. 

Scarlett Johannson plays Midge Campbell, a famous actress who strikes up a flirtation with Augie rooted in a combination of attraction and proximity. 

Augie comes to Asteroid City with a secret: his wife died weeks ago but he somehow has not mustered up the courage to tell his four children (Woody and a trio of spooky little girls) that their mother is no longer among the living. 

The world-weary shutterbug is eager to drop the girls off at the home of their loving grandfather Stanley (Tom Hanks). Hanks unsurprisingly fits in snugly into the Wes Anderson universe. How could he not? The man collects old typewriters, for God’s sake. 

The relationship between Augie and a father in law who does not understand him, or even particularly like him, yet is connected to him forever through his daughter and their children forms the film’s emotional core. 

Because Asteroid City puts the action inside multiple frames it can easily feel a little dry and devoid of emotion but in true Anderson form, an overwhelming sense of melancholy pervades even the film’s funniest moments. 

Hanks sports a formidable mustache, as does Steve Carrell as an officious hotel employee. 

Asteroid City would be worth seeing for the quality of its mustaches alone. 

The many mustaches of Asteroid City (which, incidentally, is also the name of my favorite Guided By Voices song) are like the film itself: neat, clean and meticulous. 

Anderson is such a perfectionist that he might as well have determined how many hairs should be in each specific mustache. Anderson maintains such a sense of order that a big, sloppy mustache would completely destroy the film’s aesthetic, rendering it worthless.  

Asteroid City turns out to be much more than the home of the Junior Stargazers convention. An actual emissary from the stars descends in the form of an alien who pops in just long enough to retrieve a meteor. 

The alien in Asteroid City does not put in much more than a cameo. That enraged Declan, who was very excited about the alien and the science fiction aspects and very non-excited by the twee stylization, witty dialogue and wonderful performances.

Jeffrey Wright is a standout as an eccentric general who, in perhaps my favorite scene in a movie full of them delivers a very animated speech where he seems to go through his entire life in the space of about two minutes. 

Wright is a brilliant, meticulous actor and his monologue is a glorious acting solo.

Asteroid City is about a town under quarantine. That lends it a certain timeliness even as it represents Anderson’s beautiful fantasy of the past. 

I didn’t just love Asteroid City. I wanted to grind it up and snort it. I wanted to inject it inside my body. I wanted to live inside its delicate universe. 

What I guess I’m saying is that I am a Wes Anderson fan and Asteroid City is one of his best films. 

Four stars out of Four Stars