Twenty-seven years into his filmmaking career, Wes Anderson is having something of an unlikely social media moment. TikTok users are reenacting their daily routines with artsy insouciance to the score of The French Dispatch; AI mavens are generating Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter spoofs that ape his signature fastidious compositional style. Meanwhile, over on Instagram, “accidental Wes Anderson” shots (symmetry, quirk, pastel colours) have been racking up enough likes to justify a hardback compilation of the best.
So it’s rather lovely – and exciting – that the Anderson film which should meet this moment is his oddest and most complex to date. For long-term fans who’ve sometimes worried that the cerebral and emotional riches in Anderson’s work can be overlooked it’s pure catnip, but you can’t help but wonder what on earth the Gen-Z whimsy-seekers will make of it.
Asteroid City is the name of a small desert settlement in the American southwest, built around an enormous crater from a meteor strike in 3007 BC. But it’s also the title of a new play by Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), a William Inge type writing a Picnic-like ensemble piece for a group of Actors Studio types in 1950s New York. One is Jones Hall (a never-better Jason Schwartzman), a former carpenter discovered by Adrien Brody’s pioneering theatre director Schubert Green, who is cast in the play’s lead role: Augie Steenbeck, a war photographer and widowed father of four: son Woodrow (Eighth Grade’s Jake Ryan) and three adorable-slash-vaguely menacing younger daughters.
The play on stage becomes the film on screen: families assemble for the annual Junior Stargazers’ prize-giving ceremony, which descends into panic after being disrupted by an uninvited extraterrestrial guest. But Anderson keeps zagging back from this sun-bleached microcosm of nuclear-age anxieties to the monochrome metropolis in the east – where Earp, Jones, his Marilyn Monroe-esque co-star Mercedes Ford (Scarlett Johansson) and their colleagues are trying to fathom what their country stands for (and how to pin it down artistically) at the 20th century’s unsteady inflection point.
It’s juicily ambitious stuff: imagine the familial tensions of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited mapped onto an entire nation, but also playing out in multiple close-up vignettes. First on the phone, and then later in person, we see Augie’s strained relationship with his severe father-in-law, Stanley – who’s played by Tom Hanks, one of a few sharp new additions to the Anderson repertory troupe. Then in a nearby bungalow, Johansson’s character’s character – who’s also an actress, called Midge Campbell – flirts hesitantly with Augie through the window, while looking after her teenage daughter Dinah, another young astrophysics whiz. Played by Grace Edwards, she takes a shine to the bashful Woodrow – amid a stuffed blue-chip cast, these two relative newcomers are mesmerisingly assured.