‘Asteroid City’ May Test Even the Most Devoted of Wes Anderson’s Fans

Is the filmmaker Wes Anderson beyond brilliant or just insufferable? The hyperbolic color palette; the unrelenting artifice; the scare quotes around character, motivation, and type; the airlessness of the mise en scènes; and a camera whose self-reflexive nature betokens a filmmaker enamored of his own cleverness: Mr. Anderson didn’t invent postmodernism or the notion of meta-, but he could readily serve as the poster boy for either.“Asteroid City,” the latest venture from the director of “Rushmore,” “The Royal Tenenbaums,” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” will surprise no one. Mr. Anderson’s detractors, a vociferous bunch on the whole, will bemoan the concatenation of same-old, same-old. Mr. Anderson’s fans, who are no less vociferous, will applaud the consistency of his vision. The lines have been drawn. Even so, the latter group might find its devotion tested by the new picture. “Arch” doesn’t begin to describe it.What is “Asteroid City”? Mr. Anderson begins the film with a television program circa 1955, a variation on “Philco Television Playhouse” or “Kraft Television Theater,” prestige anthology programs that featured dramas culled from both Broadway and the writer’s room. Bryan Cranston is “The Host,” an excessively formal figure whose diction is immaculate and movements stiff. He introduces us to Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), a Tennessee Williams-like playwright ensconced on what is clearly a stage. “Tonight’s program,” Mr. Cranston intones, “takes us backstage to witness first-hand the creation, start to finish, of a new play mounted on the American stage.” Soon, though, the purview widens and we’re in an isolated township in the desert Southwest. The landscape is suffused with a shock of saturated colors and surrounded by red rock mountains. The camera swivels to give us the lay of the land: a highway, a gas station, a diner, guest accommodations, and an unfinished offramp. Welcome to Asteroid City, population 87. The city hosts a state-of-the-art space observatory and gets its name from a nearby crater left by a meteor some 3,000 years ago. A quintet of high school students arrive for a weekend event sponsored, in part, by the U.S. military. The teenagers, all of whom are case studies in social discomfort, have each invented one kind of gadget or another. Prizes are in the offing, as are tensions with their parents and guardians. Mushroom clouds punctuate the horizon. The testing of atomic weapons continues apace.The cast is star-studded. Scarlett Johansson is Midge Campbell, a film star in the mold of Kim Novak. Steve Carell is the manager of a modest motel/campsite. Jeffrey Wright is General Gibson, a man given to interrupting boilerplate texts with dramatic interpretations of them. Tilda Swinton is on hand, as are Tom Hanks, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Hope Davis, and Liev Schreiber. Jason Schwartzman is a war photographer, a parent of three precocious girls, and a brilliant son. He’s not yet told them that their mother has recently died.Or is Mr. Schwartzman an actor in “Asteroid City,” the play? He’s both, actually, as the film shifts, with erratic consistency, between the pastel environs of the Arizona landscape and the faux setting of the television broadcast. “‘Asteroid City’,” Mr. Cranston reminds us, “does not exist.” Mr. Anderson has, then, crafted a fiction within a fiction that is … what, exactly? Keeping up with the director’s machinations is a fool’s errand, largely because he doesn’t establish a sense of grounding or, for that matter, resolution. Mr. Anderson has crafted a picture that prides itself on being much ado about its own fine self. We’re left on the outside, looking in.This is not to say that the picture isn’t watchable. Scene by scene, “Asteroid City” is impeccably choreographed. Mr. Anderson’s knack for composition — I’m guessing he’s as much a fan of Edward Hopper as he is of Frank Tashlin — is hip to the verities of point and counterpoint. His cachet as an auteur likely accounts for his recurring ability to attract Big Name Stars. Do they enjoy limiting themselves to characters possessed of one and only one dimension? Maybe.That reminds me: The two most animated characters in the film are, well, animated: a road runner, clearly based on the Warner Brothers “meep meep” cartoon character, and a pop-eyed Giacometti-thin alien who appears for all of a minute or two and shimmies away with the film. Otherwise, “Asteroid City” is a nice place to visit, but only if you’re in the mood for an excess of cinematic cotton candy.

‘Asteroid City’ May Test Even the Most Devoted of Wes Anderson’s Fans

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