Asteroid City is a series of exquisite and soulless tableaux all coming apart at the seams

The degree to which Asteroid City — Wes Anderson’s latest bespoke slice of cinematic Americana brought to life by a cast of his favorite players — is able to speak to you with its story about grief, longing, and science depends on how in the bag you are for the director’s signature creative tastes. All the ingredients for an Anderson classic are present, accounted for, and spun together with an artful precision guaranteed to thoroughly delight this generation’s students of his style who meme as a means of tribute. But for those who tend to find Anderson’s work far too charmed with itself for its attempts at comedy, or profundity, or heartfelt sincerity to properly land, those very same ingredients might make Asteroid City feel a lot like the work of a creative talent who’s inadvertently parodying himself.

At its core, beneath all of the immaculate set dressing, razor-sharp stage direction, and fancifully practical effects that combine to create a living diorama as small desert town, Asteroid City is a story about the act of storytelling and how it can serve a deeply cathartic purpose during times of personal loss. 

At first, grief is one of the few things war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) is still capable of feeling following the untimely death of his wife (Margot Robbie), which he’s determined to keep secret from their four children. It’s relatively easy for Augie, an awkward man whose beard often seems to be wearing him, to hide the truth about his wife from his young triplet daughters who see their family’s cross-country road trip as an adventure. But Augie’s inner turmoil is much, much harder for him to conceal from his teenage son, Woodrow (Jake Ryan), a similarly awkward boy whose passion for all things astronomical is the entire reason the family ends up stopping in Asteroid City to participate in the local Junior Stargazer convention.

Augie’s story — the one about a widower unsure of his ability to stand up to his father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks) or to raise kids without a woman by his side — is Asteroid City’s beating heart and the place where most of the movie’s aggressively deadpan characters are put on display like expensive dolls against a windswept desert backdrop rendered in earthy pastels. But Augie’s story is but one of the multiple levels Asteroid City’s working on with its nesting doll narrative structure that frames him not just as a person within a movie but also as a character who’s part of a television show about the production of a play that takes place in the midst of yet another play, at least one of which is titled “Asteroid City.”

Constructing dense, intricately designed tableaux that serve as windows into and thesis statements about the lives of odd people living in quirky places is old hat for Anderson. But it’s somewhat mesmerizing to see Asteroid City, the physical place, come together like the centerpiece of an experimental bit of theater trying to say something — it’s never really clear what — about the condition of being nostalgic for the ’50s.

From shot to shot, Asteroid City is both a town in the middle of a sandy, heat-mirage-filled void and a stage merely made to look like the sort of setting where Augie might unexpectedly encounter other deadpan-spouting characters like actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and schoolteacher June Douglas (Maya Hawke). And yet, for all of the ultra-stylized stage play charm Asteroid City’s able to lead with because of its aesthetics, the illusion of it all quickly begins to falter once the Steenbecks really start interacting with people and the movie reveals itself to be far more interested in making sure that characters are always talking rather than making sure they have anything genuinely interesting to say.

In Asteroid City, you can plainly see Anderson’s fondness for symmetrical framing and working in vivid color palettes whose softness belies their general loudness. Those creative instincts serve the movie well in terms of making it look like a polished piece of cinema from a distance where the movie’s ambition is clearly reflected in the sheer size of its cast.

But as Asteroid City zooms in on Augie and Midge to give you a chance to appreciate the fine details of their tightly choreographed dramatic dance, many of the film’s supporting characters — like Midge’s daughter, Dinah (Grace Edwards) — start to feel more like half-thought-out concepts that have been knocking around in Anderson’s head generally rather than people he has concrete plans for within this story. This increasingly becomes the case as Asteroid City begins to let the seams of its artful, technicolor world come undone in order to give way to the black-and-white reality — the television show about a play — that exists one level above it.

As the show’s host (Bryan Cranston) walks you through the behind-the-scenes drama playing out between Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) — the playwright behind Asteroid City — and stage director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), it gets harder to keep hold of what Asteroid City is trying to articulate about its characters. More often than not, Asteroid City feels like it’s piling on visual tricks meant to dazzle you in place of true chemistry between characters or cohesion between plot lines that might work to illustrate a larger point.

That isn’t to say Asteroid City isn’t entertaining — quite the opposite, as it is a wonder for the eyes that makes it easy to understand why Anderson obsessives are so prone to seeing profundity and genius in his work. But it’s also a pointedly acquired taste that’s definitely going to leave some viewers bewildered, unsatisfied, and curious as to what all the fuss has been about.

Asteroid City also stars Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Steve Carell, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Tony Revolori, Jeff Goldblum, Sophia Lillis, Fisher Stevens, Rita Wilson, and Bob Balaban. The movie hits theaters on June 16th.