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| ‘Asteroid City’ Review: Our Town and Country | ‘Asteroid City’ Review: Our Town and Country |
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| “Asteroid City,” the latest from Wes Anderson, is filled with the assiduous visuals, mythic faces and charming curiosities that you expect from this singular filmmaker. It’s comic and often wry, but like some of his other films, it has the soul of a tragedy. It’s partly set in 1955 in a fictional Southwest town, a lonely four corners with a diner, gas station and motor inn. Palm trees and cactuses stipple the town, and reddish buttes rise in the distance. It looks like an ordinary pit stop save for the atomic cloud soon mushrooming in the sky. | “Asteroid City,” the latest from Wes Anderson, is filled with the assiduous visuals, mythic faces and charming curiosities that you expect from this singular filmmaker. It’s comic and often wry, but like some of his other films, it has the soul of a tragedy. It’s partly set in 1955 in a fictional Southwest town, a lonely four corners with a diner, gas station and motor inn. Palm trees and cactuses stipple the town, and reddish buttes rise in the distance. It looks like an ordinary pit stop save for the atomic cloud soon mushrooming in the sky. |
| Written by Anderson, the film is about desire and death, small mysteries and cosmic unknowns and the stories that we make of all the stuff called life. It opens in black-and-white on an unnamed television host (Bryan Cranston, severe and mustachioed) in a studio. Tightly encased by the boxy aspect ratio and speaking into the camera, he introduces the evening’s program, a “backstage” look at the creation of a new play, “Asteroid City,” that’s been made “expressly for this broadcast.” He then presents the playwright (Edward Norton), who rises from his typewriter to stand on a bare stage and present the characters. | Written by Anderson, the film is about desire and death, small mysteries and cosmic unknowns and the stories that we make of all the stuff called life. It opens in black-and-white on an unnamed television host (Bryan Cranston, severe and mustachioed) in a studio. Tightly encased by the boxy aspect ratio and speaking into the camera, he introduces the evening’s program, a “backstage” look at the creation of a new play, “Asteroid City,” that’s been made “expressly for this broadcast.” He then presents the playwright (Edward Norton), who rises from his typewriter to stand on a bare stage and present the characters. |
| The suited television host and the broadcast studio with its ticking clock conjure up 1950s live anthology dramas like “Studio One,” and you may flash on Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” when the host and playwright start speaking. Anderson quickly fills up the stage and the film, too. A train chugs in under the opening credits carrying a bounty of goods: gravel, avocados, pecans, John Deere tractors, plump Pontiacs and a 10-megaton nuclear warhead. Jeffrey Wright enters to play a five-star general, while Tilda Swinton shows up as a scientist. Tom Hanks plays a dashing curmudgeon; Adrien Brody makes the muscular theater director. | The suited television host and the broadcast studio with its ticking clock conjure up 1950s live anthology dramas like “Studio One,” and you may flash on Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” when the host and playwright start speaking. Anderson quickly fills up the stage and the film, too. A train chugs in under the opening credits carrying a bounty of goods: gravel, avocados, pecans, John Deere tractors, plump Pontiacs and a 10-megaton nuclear warhead. Jeffrey Wright enters to play a five-star general, while Tilda Swinton shows up as a scientist. Tom Hanks plays a dashing curmudgeon; Adrien Brody makes the muscular theater director. |
| The drama starts soon after the playwright’s introductory remarks, except it doesn’t look anything like a theater production. It looks like a film, a meticulous, detailed, visually balanced wide-screen Wes Anderson one. There’s no proscenium, no stage, no wings, no audience. The blue sky stretches over the town; the yellow desert extends into infinity. The characters enter by car and bus, and are shot in long view and intimate close-up, beautifully framed by the camera. The palette is an astonishment, a dusty rainbow of hues. It looks like this story was left to bleach in the sun before being wrapped in transparent yellowed plastic. | The drama starts soon after the playwright’s introductory remarks, except it doesn’t look anything like a theater production. It looks like a film, a meticulous, detailed, visually balanced wide-screen Wes Anderson one. There’s no proscenium, no stage, no wings, no audience. The blue sky stretches over the town; the yellow desert extends into infinity. The characters enter by car and bus, and are shot in long view and intimate close-up, beautifully framed by the camera. The palette is an astonishment, a dusty rainbow of hues. It looks like this story was left to bleach in the sun before being wrapped in transparent yellowed plastic. |
| The colors are mesmerizing and ever-so-gently destabilizing. These pigments signal that you’ve entered a new fictional realm that, like the television studio, is at once immediately recognizable and somehow foreign. The interplay between the familiar and the strange, like that between the theatrical and the cinematic, is a foundational theme in Anderson’s films, which, like most movies, look a lot like life yet are always different. What makes that difference is art — the voice, sensibility, technique, craft, money, luck and how the thrilling, terrifying mess of existence is gathered, organized and then set loose upon the world. |