Asteroid City

ASTEROID CITY   **1/2

Wes Anderson

2023

IDEA:  In 1955, a television program presents a production of the play Asteroid City, about events occurring during a Junior Stargazer convention in the titular Southwestern desert town.

BLURB:  Compared to the visual-semiotic overload and frenetic pacing of his last two features, The French Dispatch and Isle of Dogs, Wes Anderson has gone positively austere with Asteroid City. At least aesthetically, anyway. The images here exhibit all of his signature, exactingly geometric compositions and attention to detail, but they have an uncluttered clarity and directness that feel, if not new, then refreshingly pared-down for a director who’s been trending toward increasingly grandiloquent, byzantine mise-en-scènes. Asteroid City presents the eponymous fictional desert town as an instantly recognizable yet uniquely distilled vision of a retro-futurist postwar America; all sumptuous pastel hues and sleek gadgets, it's an inchoate capitalist Space Age utopia in the shadow of Cold War paranoia. With the invaluable contributions of Robert Yeoman and Adam Stockhausen, Anderson maps the locale through swiveling pans and lateral sequence shots, giving it both a spatial legibility and tactility befitting of its status as a stage play within the film’s diegesis. Unfortunately, Anderson’s astuteness as a visual designer is not echoed in the construction of his plot, a laboriously overwrought nesting-doll meta-text that convolutes and undercuts the film’s rather simple ideas about the power of storytelling to organize life’s chaos. How can chaos be controlled if it scarcely seems to exist in the first place, either beneath Anderson’s fussy surfaces or the characters’ unremitting stolidness? The director can convince us that Asteroid City is real, but the interiorities of its actor-inhabitants remain purely theoretical.