Asteroid City Review: Playful And Profound, A Wes Anderson Film In Every Respect

A consummate illusionist's repertoire of tricks is on full display in Wes Anderson's bright and breezy cinematic whimsy, Asteroid City. It is a film in which beguiling images, lively performances and the sensuality of colours coalesce in delectable harmony.

With its complement of zany characters, three-layered narrative framing and a headily heightened palette, it translates into a veritable smorgasbord of riches, if you care to stay with, and respond to, the rhythms of the ceaselessly inventive film all the way through.

To naysayers, the brilliantly vivid world building that Anderson does - Asteroid City was filmed on a ruddy location off Madrid where the camera had an uninterrupted view of the environs - might seem way too curated and immaculately designed to be emotionally engaging.

That indeed was the principal criticism directed at the director's previous work, The French Dispatch. Some felt it was too flighty to be truly weighty. They will probably feel the same way about Asteroid City. Ignore them and dive right in.

Anderson's mastery over spatial detailing and stylistic leaps results in a film with a gorgeous spectrum of hypnotic moments that are replete with flights of fancy, dashes of fantasy, forays into science fiction and whole lot of visual flair.

A footnote for Indian cineastes: Asteroid City has a sequence in which teen astronomers attending a stargazers convention play the Memory Game, which harks back to a scene in Satyajit Ray's Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest).

What we watch on the screen - events at a youth stargazers congregation in a mid-1950s Southwestern US desert town, Asteroid City (population: 87) - is actually a play being performed for a television setup. Three distinct storytelling forms - cinema, the small screen and theatre - converge in starkly stylised ways in Anderson's screenplay, written on the basis of a story he authored with Roman Coppola.

In an unabashedly indulgent hat tip to popular notions of genius coupled with popular myths surrounding unidentified flying objects and extraterrestrials, Asteroid City is composed of colour-accentuated widescreen frames that capture a desert landscape in which the eye can see forever. These are interspersed with black and white Academy ratio footage depicting the behind-the-scenes goings-on during the planning and making of the play within the movie.

Asteroid City is a celebration of the joy of creation and performance, of the theatre of life and the life that courses through theatre, of the capacity of teen prodigies to spring surprises (and shocks) in a world that is sought to be streamlined and controlled by adults with their obsession with power and rules.

The TV show that the play is being recorded for is hosted by a nattily togged up Bryan Cranston - the character is identified simply as the Host. He narrates the story of the theatrical adaptation of a 1950s play written by playwright Conrad Earp (Ed Norton) with the same title as that of the film and directed, as we learn a little later, by Schubert Green (Adrien Brody).

Several of the actors in the cast portray actors who embody a character in the televised theatre production that is the film that is unfolding before us. The freewheeling, porous textual and performative admixture creates a wildly idiosyncratic and complex weaving in and out of the real and the imagined and/or enacted.

Probably not as visually lush and diverse as Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, Asteroid City soars just as high in terms of colour, imagination and innovation. Production designer Adam Stockhausen and director of photography Robert Yeoman are at the top of their respective games, as is the massive ensemble cast.

The actors are led by long-time Anderson collaborator Jason Schwartzman and include other regulars as Tilda Swinton (as an astronomer at the local observatory), Willem Dafoe (as a venerated acting coach) and Jeff Goldblum (as an alien). Among the newcomers to the fold is Scarlett Johansson (she isn't strictly a stranger to the Anderson universe having voiced Nutmeg in the animated Isle of Dogs).

Schwartzman plays war photographer Augie Steenbeck (as also Jones Hall, the actor portraying Augie in the play), who is at the meteor crash site with his brainy son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and three daughters, from whom he has concealed the news of his wife's death to the chagrin of his father-in-law, Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks).

Johansson is jaded movie actress Midge Campbell (and Mercedes Ford, the actress playing Midge in the theatre production) who is in Asteroid City with her gifted daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards) who, like Woodrow, is an honouree at the upcoming convention.

Amid literally earth-shattering events, the town is going to be witness over the next few days to its share of love and rebellion as Dinah and Woodrow drift close to each other, and a couple of other convention participants thrive on defying authority and posing challenges to the grown-ups who believe that the right to draw lines is theirs and theirs alone.

The desert town of Asteroid City, built from scratch for the film, provides a clean view of the horizon. The brightness of the light here heightens the red of the sand and the blue of the sky. The setting is dotted with stylised retro props - a luncheonette, a motel with ten cabins, a gas station with a single-pump and a telephone booth.

Among the town's tourist attractions are a giant crater created by a 3,000-year-old asteroid and an observatory that hosts the annual Junior Stargazers convention where young aspiring scientists are scheduled to be officially recognised for their inventions.

The children arrive at the venue with their parents and teachers. The event is overrun by a couple of visitations by an alien that necessitates the imposition of a military quarantine on the attendees. The decision triggers a chain of events that include a cover-up, an expose and an attempted official clampdown.

Scarlett Johansson stands out with a finely-tuned performance that combines word-weariness and cynicism with charm that is much more than skin deep.

Jason Schwartzman, in his seventh film with Anderson, is terrific. He acquires a gruff voice, exudes a steely demeanour and sports a thick beard that masks his emotions as a man processing loss and grief while striving for closure for himself and his children.

Asteroid City has a host of other delightful turns, most notably from Bryan Cranston, Rupert Friend (in the role of dancing cowboy Montana) and Maya Hawke (as an elementary schoolteacher who finds love in the desert).

Asteroid City is a Wes Anderson film in every respect. It is at once playful and profound, joyful and melancholic, radical and steady, meta textual and methodical and, and as important as anything else, entertaining and captivatingly intriguing.