Review Roundup: Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City

Much like in Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, which told a Holocaust story through several layers of stories and memories, Asteroid City is a saga of existential anxieties filtered through enamoring vistas that feel composed of miniatures and painted flats. The film’s numerous parental characters struggle to explain (to their children) and grapple (themselves) with the finite nature of life, which seems all the more minuscule when contrasted with the increasingly infinite nature of the universe. In effect, the movie’s numerous layers involve not just the desperate search for answers through science and religion, but the search for the search itself — the struggles to even put into words, or dramatic scenarios, the full weight of what’s being asked when a child wonders what happens when we die.

Anderson’s latest draws its tender potency from the grasping for understanding and the yearning to be understood in an uncharacteristic personal statement from one of the present’s most intently misread auteurs. Around the margins of the humor more “ha-ha” funny than his usual drollery (how he tracked down three little girls with Swiss-watch comic timing beggars belief), his figures of unspoken hurt struggle to comprehend art, God, other people, themselves.

If all of Anderson’s movies are sustained by the tension between order and chaos, uncertainty and doubt, Asteroid City is the first that takes that tension as its subject, often expressing it through the friction created by rubbing together its various levels of non-reality. Some might see that as self-amused navel-gazing, but the unexpected moment towards the end when Anderson finds a certain equilibrium between those contradictory forces — with a major assist from a movie star whose name you suddenly remember seeing in the credits some 100 minutes earlier — is so crushingly beautiful and well-earned that the artifice surrounding it simply falls away.

Anderson’s films are just as distinctive in their emotional thrust. The characters are fantastical, but their draw toward escapism and adventure is deeply felt, and it comes with a strong sense of whimsical wonder. His exotic locales make his stories seem like familiar, distant dreams. Nostalgia is at the heart of Asteroid City just as much as it’s been in his past films, even though the imaginative design is so much more fanciful than actual history.

There’s a lot going on in Anderson’s 11th film, arguably too much — even for him. Set in the mid-1950s at a Junior Stargazer convention held in a fictional American desert town (the eponymous “Asteroid City,” think New Mexico meets Nevada), where parents and students all converge for this special annual gathering (so it’s a Santa Fe aesthetic with pastels). The town’s most celebrated attraction is a nearby giant meteoric crater and celestial observatory. Given the multitude of peculiar characters, their various personal dramas and sorrows, and Anderson’s penchant for chock-a-block schematized dialogue, knotty information dumps, and visual density, this would be more than enough for a bountiful Wes Anderson movie.

Asteroid City has all of the ticks that make Anderson Anderson: The slow pans, the deliberate framing, the erudite dialogue, and a narrator to boot. It’s also his best film since 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, a thoroughly hilarious piece that coalesces into something almost haunting. Asteroid City is thick with Americana, but the charming hootenanny of it all works in tandem with the deep questions the director is asking.