Asteroid City shows why some people hate Wes Anderson so much (and others love him)

The idiosyncratic Texan director is one of the most polarising figures in cinema, writes Louis Chilton. His latest offering typifies exactly why some people are put off him – and why he’s still such a vital filmmaker

Wes man: Jason Schwartzman in ‘Asteroid City’ (Focus Features)

Let’s go see the new Wes Anderson film.” To some people, these eight words sound like the sure promise of a great time. To others, a violent threat. When it comes to filmmakers, few, if any, are as likely to elicit a strong reaction as the 54-year-old Texan. Through films such as The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson has developed a singular style – his films are often compared to dollhouses – much parodied but never replicated. Admirers laud him as a giant of the medium; detractors find the smothering artifice of his style twee and airless. Asteroid City, Anderson’s latest offering, exemplifies exactly why people are so reflexively put off his oeuvre. But it also shows exactly why he’s so vital.

Perhaps the main criticism of Anderson is the supposed frigidity of his films, the way his characters seldom betray their emotions, even in the throes of inner crisis. This is true of Asteroid City. Early in the movie, we see Augie Steenbeck (played by Jason Schwartzman) make a telephone call to father-in-law Stanley Zak. (Well, technically, Schwartzman is playing an actor playing Augie Steenbeck, as part of an elaborate play-within-a-film framing device.) He tells Stanley, who is portrayed by a silver-haired, mustachioed Tom Hanks, that he is stuck in Asteroid City with his four children – science “brainiac” Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and three young girls – and he needs Stanley to come and collect them. (Asteroid City, by the way, is a misnomer: it’s a small desert settlement next to a meteor crater, barely more than an outpost.) Stanley then brings up Augie’s wife. We infer that she has died, and that Augie has not had the heart to tell his children. “It’s never the right time,” Augie says. “It’s always the wrong time,” Stanley replies. The way this conversation is staged, in an unsentimental near-monotone, typifies Anderson’s approach to pathos. But the idea that it’s somehow insincere couldn’t be further from the truth.

The scene is Wes Anderson in a nutshell, from the matter-of-fact dialogue to the arch, symmetrical framing. Stanley, an upper-crust patriarch, passingly evokes Gene Hackman’s prickly Royal Tenenbaum. Repeated references to his golf course nod to a fascination with hobbies that has peppered Anderson’s work since his breakthrough feature Rushmore (1999). The characters, as they usually do in Anderson films, speak about grave personal issues with a plain, detached manner. In the following scene, Augie makes good on his promise and tells his children about their mother’s passing; there, the blunt, dispassionate dialogue is dialled up even more for comic effect. (More echoes of Tenenbaums here – specifically the scene wherein Royal informs his kids he’s getting divorced.) Sceptics will point to these scenes as evidence of Anderson’s emotional constipation. Of the glibness of his writing. It’s true: most other filmmakers would surely have expanded such a scene into a sweeping emotional moment, replete with tears and shouting. Feelings writ large, all there on the screen. But not him.

The tension underlying Asteroid City, and indeed all of Anderson’s films, is that between artifice and life, between flippancy and sincerity. His characters exist in a world governed by stiff formality: their flattened conversational style is of a piece with the antiseptic neatness of the environments and of Anderson’s camera. And yet, listen to what the characters are actually saying, and it’s clear they are not so unfeeling. Anderson characters experience real human emotions – grief; love; resentment – and express them, as humans do, imperfectly. They strive for cold, analytical dispassion but cannot ever really achieve it. In Asteroid City, characters are constantly speaking in inelegant sentences, repeating words and phrases tautologically – cracks of fallibility within the world of order. The actor playing Augie struggles to understand his character; Augie himself is just as bewildered.

It’s significant, too, that much of the phone conversation between Augie and Stanley is presented in split-screen, with the two characters arranged at either side, looking the other in the eye. This is a typically Andersonian visual flourish that breaks not only the “reality” of the scene, but of the supposed “play-within-a-film” (plays after all, do not have a screen to split). Here, though, the director’s artifice is clearly used not to nullify the emotional resonance of the scene but to augment it. Arguably, this is what he has always been doing.

Asteroid City takes Anderson’s ersatz tendencies to new heights. When an extra-terrestrial arrives in Asteroid City, it’s rendered with a cartoonishness that makes Mars Attacks! look like Alien. Several times throughout the film, a roadrunner can be seen flitting across the screen, animated with stop-motion. (Anderson memorably employed stop-motion to create the phantasmagorical “jaguar shark” in 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and has made two fully stop-motion films.) It’s painstakingly clear at all times that what we’re watching is a fabrication, a non-reality. Wanting us to take the characters seriously despite this is the challenge of Anderson’s approach, and, for many, his failing. But who among us hasn’t ever felt at odds with the world, surrounded by rules and falsehoods beyond our control? In this way, Anderson’s films speak to the unease and ennui of modern life far more keenly than most “realistic” directors.

Tom Hanks in Wes Anderson’s ‘Asteroid City' (Pop 87 Productions/Focus Features)

The allergy that many people have to Wes Anderson’s films is unlikely to be cured anytime soon. Age has only seen him grow more set in his ways, more beholden to his own fastidious sensibility. But for all its desert-dry humour, for all its alienating flights of fancy, Asteroid City is, at its core, a perversely sincere film about the human condition. It’s easy to imagine people being put off, thinking, perhaps, that they are in some way missing the joke. What if there’s simply no joke to get?

‘Asteroid City’ is out in cinemas now