Early on, we meet some of the creative forces behind this production, including a Tennessee Williams-ish playwright (Edward Norton) and an Elia Kazan-esque director (Adrien Brody). It’s an archly overarching framing device delineated by boxily framed black-and-white images and given prominent positioning throughout Anderson’s two-act screenplay (drawn from an idea conceived with his regular collaborator Roman Coppola). (My first go-round, at last month’s Cannes Film Festival, tended frustratingly toward the latter a second viewing proved eye-opening, if a few pans short of a 180-degree reversal.) “Asteroid City,” you see, is not just a movie we’re watching but a “hypothetical play,” in the words of a genial host-narrator (Bryan Cranston), that’s being staged and produced for 1950s television. The conceit itself is by turns intriguing and laborious, and depending on your willingness to unpack it, it will be either the revelation that sends this movie soaring into the stratosphere or the heavy stone that drags its featherweight pleasures down to earth. But there’s something captivating about that early stillness: Asteroid City, we see, is not just a town but a carefully constructed set, and not just a carefully constructed set but the scaffolding for a typically elaborate formal and narrative conceit. Not that you’ll mind when Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Tilda Swinton, Jeffrey Wright and other familiar and newly minted members of Anderson’s company turn up, bringing with them a swirl of persnickety, precisely choreographed human activity. It is also, at this early stage, a museum happily devoid of visitors. Welcome to Asteroid City, a gorgeous piece of scenery even by Anderson’s standards and an open-air museum of antiquarian delights, with its 40-cent milkshakes, vintage vending machines and pastel-hued automobiles. That last one is a symbol: of unrealized promise, yes, but also of the-sky’s-the-limit possibility. Instead, the camera nimbly rotates nearly 360 degrees, pausing mid-pan to register the glories of Adam Stockhausen’s Wild Wild Wes production design: a diner, a motel, a filling station, a highway ramp to nowhere. Our first glimpse of it is deeply transporting: No sounds break the silence, and no actors (or tumbleweeds) disrupt the vast spaces of Robert Yeoman’s impeccably framed widescreen compositions. “Asteroid City,” Wes Anderson’s half-irritating, half-intoxicating desert bloom of a movie, unfolds mostly in 1955 in a small Southwest town - a postcard-perfect oasis surrounded by cactuses, red rocks and vast horizons.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |