My wife loves Wes Anderson. A couple of Christmases ago, she got a book about him and his movies. She thinks everything he has done is great — from Bottle Rocket to now.
Me? Not so much. I think there is good Wes (Rushmore, Royal Tenenbaums, Moonlight Kingdom, Grand Budapest Hotel), bad Wes (The French Dispatch, Isle of Dogs and (sorry) The Fantastic Mr. Fox), and something in-between (Life Aquatic, I mean Bill Murray and Willem Dafoem, and Darjeeling Limited). And yesterday, we caught Asteroid City.
From the first scene, it’s a Wes Anderson movie — the cinematography, the dialogue, the story — all very framed and intentional. The object is nested, and nested again.
In this case, the object is a play, which maybe has been concocted by playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton — the cast is all the usual suspects, plus Tom Hanks but minus Bill Murray) and might even have existed in the real world, but maybe not. I’m really not sure.
The play happens in a sun-scorched American Southwest, with no shade in sight, though apparently no real heat either (which strikes me as strange as I have colleagues in Texas recently who tell me sun-scorched is very, very, very hot indeed).
I won’t get into the plot, for fear of spoilers, except to say that it conflates and compresses the play, its actual players, their relationships to the playwright and reality in ways that make it not easy to follow what the hell is happening. Oh, and there’s an alien.
What I do know, Jason Schwartzman is interesting, Scarlett Johannsen (above) is incandescent, Liv Schrieber and Rupert Friend will have you asking where do I know these two from, and the Faris triplets steal the show. And Jeff Goldblum was great as The Alien.
I liked it, mostly because it clocked in under 2 hours. I have no idea what it all meant. I put it above Life Aquatic but not quite in good Wes territory. We’ll see what I think on second watch.
What others thought:
NYTimes: Our Town and Country
Esquire: Is this the best Wes Anderson film?
NPR: Has Wes Anderson outdone himself with Asteroid City?
kevdonahue.com 
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