Asteroid City: Wes Anderson hands his detractors a wealth of ammunition

Some way into the latest Wes Anderson film, Tilda Swinton arrives as (what else?) a statuesquely oddball boffin to honour the junior astronomers sprouting around the feet of every second American movie star. Swinton was also before an audience – and the best thing in the film – for the director’s last concoction, the equally cluttered French Dispatch.

Those performances on raised podiums press home the notion that Anderson’s films are now ceremonies to which lucky actors are invited. The hugely complex rituals are seemingly planned in doll’s houses whose spotless gables are replicated perfectly on screen. They troop the (pastel) colour. They stage the tattoo. Everyone applauds the undeniable skill without feeling anything much like an emotion.

Or that is how it feels when Anderson’s engines aren’t firing.

The latest ceremony arrives at an unfortunate time. Over the past few months, witless social-media accounts have played up to this reductive analysis. Redraw your favourite film as an Anderson joint by putting your lead character in a green suit and placing him before a pink wall. There are hints in Asteroid City of Anderson’s gift for drawing pathos from even the most formally staged encounters. Jason Schwartzman plays Augie Steenbeck, a war photographer visiting the eponymous desert town for a festival devoted to stargazing.

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This is the 1950s of witch hunts, A-bomb tests and – as framing devices will stress – a renaissance in American theatre. Recently widowed, Steenbeck sets up in a cabin whose window faces directly into another that often frames the sleek movie star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson). The actor, who is travelling with her daughter, has lived some of Marilyn Monroe’s experiences but comes across as a less fragile personality. Anderson does more nodding. Midge shares her name with Barbara Bel Geddes’s character from Vertigo, and, in a black-and-white sequence, Johansson is dressed and coiffured like Kim Novak in the same film.

Anyway, away from all that inevitable Andersonian subtext, the couple, facing each other in framed frames, exchange clipped phrases that lean as much towards Noël Coward as they do towards any contemporaneous American dramatist. Here is a lovely, sweet conceit that demands to be teased out in a film with less attention deficit than Asteroid City. But here we are. It is scarcely possible to summarise what goes on. More damningly, it is equally difficult to locate the narrative or emotional core (though that connection between Midge and Augie is a worthy contender).

[ Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City: ‘Every scene and every sentence will have three or four hidden things’ ]

The story is set up as one play in a TV anthology series hosted monochromatically by Bryan Cranston. Somehow or other, we also get to meet Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), the writer; Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), the director; and Saltzburg Keitel (Willem Dafoe), a drama teacher, who runs a class clearly modelled on the Actors Studio.

Those names alone would give you a pain. Earp writes about the west. Green shares his forename with an American theatre chain. Keitel ... well, you can see where all this is going. And we haven’t yet got to Margot Robbie echoing the Johansson-Schwartzman exchange across neighbouring balconies. Nor have we mentioned appearances by Steve Carell, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Hong Chau, Matt Dillon, Liev Schreiber or Jeff Goldblum.

It hardly needs to be said that the design is exquisite and the camera moves punctuate the story with precision. But, though considerably less hectic than The French Dispatch, the new film has even more difficulty settling upon what story it wants to tell. One commends Anderson’s efforts at suspending 1950s iconography in Plasticraft. One wishes he’d found a central spine before propelling characters along a few dozen, not always intersecting paths.

It is not enough to leave whistling the scenery.

Asteroid City opens on Friday, June 23rd