Wes Anderson films are Zen kaon for me. They use stilted dialog, precise, ornate, spectacular dioramas for sets and all of this artifice adds up to genuinely authentic moments that move me both aesthetically and emotionally. Half the time. And there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason. Films hailed by Andersonites leave me flat and films dismissed by same experts, I love. Go figure. I enjoyed French Dispatch, Grand Budapest, Isle of Dogs, and Rushmore. And now Asteroid City. This one has the narrative trick of Our Town or perhaps Gold Diggers/42nd Street et al. Here is a movie about let make a play. Well not quite. The serious earnestness of Bryan Cranston helps the documentary about a play and so on…. and part of the fun of this is how it seems to nail that late 50’s actors studio ethos in its making of section. And so we are thrust into the fictional world of Asteroid City. It feels like maybe there is a Brechtian inspired meditation on the nature of storytelling here, but it fuzzy and feels like it was not the main focus. But Cranston and the others have great fun with those outer shells of the story, capturing an earnest quasi-intellectual devotion to the art.
Through all this and the arrival of an alien, I still found myself emotionally invested in the characters and the actors (in the 50’s) playing the characters. So, WA stylized museum worthy dioramas and stew of characters who all have fits of monumental incisiveness locked me in the town with the rest of the cast and I dug it. So ya Noises Off meets 42nd Street reinforced with the Wes Anderson shmear.
