Asteroid City might be the purest expression of this dynamic because it’s about the unknown in all its forms. The romantic, Continental fascinations of The French Dispatch are hit with protest, injustice, and violence.
The Mitteleuropaïsch candy-box milieu of The Grand Budapest Hotel is undone by the creeping evil of authoritarianism. The regimented universe of Moonrise Kingdom is sent into a spiraling decline by the mania of young love. Anderson’s obsessively constructed dioramas explore the very human need to organize, quantify, and control our lives in the face of the unexpected and the uncertain. My colleague Alison Willmore (accurately) called his last effort, The French Dispatch, “the most Wes Anderson movie Wes Anderson has ever made.” One could probably say the same for each new Anderson film and certainly for the marvelous Asteroid City, which just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. While other filmmakers might answer their critics by branching out and shaking things up, Anderson, like Federico Fellini before him, doubles down on his stylistic peculiarities. Those fussy arrangements, symmetric compositions, and precise tracking shots that have become the stuff of viral videos and snarky social-media memes aren’t going away. To the casual observer, Wes Anderson might seem like someone who either refuses to read his own press or has bought into his press to an absurd degree. His new movie, Asteroid City, brings a necessary madness to the meticulous director’s method, and it amounts to a masterpiece.
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