Scarlett Johansson, Jason Schwartzman
“ASTEROID CITY” My rain: C+ (In theaters)
105 minutes | MPAA rating: PB-13
“Asteroid City” may be the most Wes Anderson movie ever.
This is a mixed blessing.
Like his last outing, the fragmented New Yorker magazine parody “The French Dispatch,” this is a meta-heavy concoction that leaves the viewer tickled by its cleverly crafted literary conceits but waiting for some sort of emotional edge to emerge from all the whimsey splattered across the screen.
In the decade since his deliriously amusing and unexpectedly moving “Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson has cleverly exploited a story-within-a-story format (reaching a high point with “The Grand Budapest Hotel”) but only at the expense of often turning his characters into cartoons rather than people we care about.
“Asteroid City” begins with a 1955 TV broadcast. An officious host (Bryan Cranston) informs us that this program (recorded in grainy black-and-white) will take us behind the scenes of the creation of a new dramatic work by one of America’s great playwrights. We see theater legend Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) pecking away at his typewriter, and then the scene shifts to full color.
Now we’re watching Earp’s play, “Asteroid City.” Except that what we’re seeing is waaaaay too big to be contained by a theater stage. The yarn unfolds in the middle of a vast desert peppered with cacti and the occasional animated roadrunner. Everything seems to be have been dusted with orange sand and bathed in Day-Glo colors The town’s buildings (gas station, diner, cabin court) seem real enough, but the Monument Valley-ish buttes in the background look like something out of an elaborate pop-up book.
The plot — to the extent that the film has one — goes like this: Dozens of travelers (drivers with car problems, a busload of adolescent science nerds and their chaperone) are stranded in Asteroid City when an alien spaceship descends over the burg’s main attraction, a meterorite crater. This close encounter of the third kind brings a whole lot of armed soldiers; everything goes into lockdown until the authorities can figure out what to do.
But here’s where the meta comes in: The characters stuck in Asteroid City periodically wander out of the play and into the black-and-white backstage area; now they are actors discussing their performances or preparing to make their entrances.
It works the other way, too. At one point Cranston’s narrator stumbles into the full color Asteroid City set, looks panicked and quickly sidesteps his way out of the film frame.
Yeah, clever. But we’ve got to care what happens in Asteroid City to fill in the other half of the equation, and we don’t. There are numerous characters whose stories might be compelling, but Anderson’s off-the-cuff style keeps us at arm’s length.
Still, it sometimes looks as if the entire membership of the Screen Actors Guild was hired for the project: Jason Schwartzman (as a widowed war photographer on a trip with his brainiac teenage son and a trio of young daughters — like the “Sesame Street” version of Macbeth’s three weird sisters); Scarlett Johansson (as a glamorous but vacuous movie star vacationing with her adolescent daughter), Jeffrey Wright (an Army general), Tom Hanks (the Schwartzman character’s wealthy father-in-law), Rupert Friend (a singing cowboy on tour with his band).
That’s just scratching the surface. Look also for Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, Maya Hawke, Matt Dillon, Steve Carell, Bob Balaban, Tilda Swinton, Fisher Stevens, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie and, in an inspired bit of casting I won’t give away here, Jeff Goldblum.
There’s some loopily lovely stuff — periodically a car chase between crooks and cops, guns blazing, rips down main street and out into the distance…apparently they’re on an endless loop. And every now and then a loud boom is accompanied by a mushroom cloud blossoming on the horizon.
But “Asteroid City” is eccentric without ever being truly engaging.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 