Pan and Slam

Movie Review: Asteroid City

PG-13 1h 45m

• Director
  • Wes Anderson
• Writers
  • Wes Anderson
  • Roman Coppola
• Stars
  • Jason Schwartzman
  • Scarlett Johansson
  • Tom Hanks

By Jason Koenigsberg

Wes Anderson has built up a resume and a reputation for being one of cinemas most poignant humorist filmmakers with an incredibly distinctive style of visuals and dialogue. Often in the past twenty years a movie from another director may come out and leave audiences saying “that felt like a Wes Anderson movie”. His talent and abilities cannot be denied and his newest film Asteroid City has all of the signature trademarks that one expects from a Wes Anderson picture that it is quite befuddling and oddly depressing that the result is such a chore to sit through. It has the all star cast with immensely talented actors featuring Tom Hanks joining Wes Anderson’s acting troupe. The colors pop like a pastel drawing on sets deliberately stylized to look like a dollhouse, crossed with a toy train set, as part of an old television show. He intercuts that with beautiful black and white cinematography using the play within a play motif which he so often does. He plays with the screen aspect ratio and uses interesting framing as always to tell the story and dive deeper into the characters and their relationships, just for some strange reason, the laughs were vacant and the dialogue delivered by so many terrific actors was not compelling enough to sustain the hour and forty-five minute runtime.

The opening shot is an old TV studio and we see Bryan Cranston front and center introducing the story we are about to see as a vintage television special from the 60s. It then cuts to the vibrant surreal colors that will occupy the title setting and the audience is treated to a fun 360 degree shot of the city and its main highlights. So far everything is set up and going as it should but then around the thirty minute mark something happens in Asteroid City and the laughs stop coming. I noticed other members of the audience that were laughing stopped laughing consistently as well. There were a few forced chuckles at times and I tried to force myself to laugh audibly as well and when you have to do that because of your admiration for the actors and director, you know you are sitting in a dull movie.

Jason Schwarztman, a Wes Anderson regular, finally matures and is given a grown up role. He is the main character, a father of three daughters dealing with the loss of his wife. Tom Hanks plays his father in law. The rest of the cast is rounded out by talented Wes Anderson veterans such as Willem Dafoe, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, and Scarlett Johansson who gives a standout performance as a C-list actress practicing her auditions and simultaneously flirting with Schwartman’s character. These are the movies best dialogue driven scenes. So what went wrong? There is no definitive answer and comedy can be an extremely fickle and tricky genre. What is funny to some is not to others and just because something is funny once does not mean it will be funny again. Everything should work in Asteroid City but for some reason it does not. The structure is well done as expected with all Wes Anderson movies and never feels needlessly complex, but the dialogue is so unusually boring it makes the movie a burden to sit through. Like the audience I saw it with, I think I wanted to like Asteroid City more than I did.

Skip it and check out Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, one of the best films of 2021 that inexplicably received zero Academy Award nominations.