Our review Asteroid cityNew film Wes Anderson with a stellar cast consisting of, among others, TO Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Margot Robbie and Edward Norton: the triumph of style over history and emotion
Two years after The French Dispatch and having just won an award Cartier Glory to the Film Director received in Venice, where he presented his new short film Wes Anderson come back with Asteroid city (here’s the press conference) where he assembled an all-star lineup: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie and many others. The style remains unmistakable, as does the signature brand, but the feeling is that Anderson is now left with only what it has to offer.
UFOs are approaching (?)
It’s 1955. An astronomy conference known as the Young Stargazer takes place in the fictional American desert town of Asteroid City. The event attracts many students and their parents who come from all over the country to take part in the Olympiad held at the same time. Here different lives meet and intertwine in unexpected ways, like Oga’s (Jason Schwartzman), Midge (Scarlett Johansson), Stanley (Tom Hanks) or Conrad (Edward Norton). When visitors to Asteroid City come into close contact, the US military decides to intervene, forcing all witnesses to be quarantined in the city.
More and more Wes Anderson
It’s about nine years old, from those of him (beautiful) Grand Budapest Hotelthat Wes Anderson is looking for a new form for his cinema. He has always been an elegant director, obsessed with geometry and clean staging, but in recent years his research has pushed itself to the limit, almost surpassing it. Asteroid city it is, to some extent, a sublimation of his new way of making and understanding cinema. a vision that favors the search for stylistic perfection at the expense of plot, theme and characters, and which for this reason itself becomes an artistic manifesto.
Yet this is the trap Anderson fell into when he decided to take this “brutal” and no-holds-barred approach: his cinema literally closed, or at least that sentimental part is gone, that attention to the stories of each individual character, to the psychology, to the fatal flaws or to the needs that each character requires in order to be truthful and a little more human. Now Wes Anderson has become an even more fundamentalist version of himself, obsessed with everything on- and off-screen and therefore forced to sacrifice the emotional core of the stories he tells.
Star cast
There is one more feature common to all of Anderson’s recent productions, and while at first glance it may not seem strictly related to the above, it is actually another symptom of his desperate search for perfection: the use of big names. Already in French control room we have witnessed an extraordinary display of power not even in the golden world of Hollywood, but here it even manages to surpass itself with such prestigious names as Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Edward Norton, Margot Robbie and Bryan Cranston.
But what’s the point of casting such actors if most of their performances are caricatures, victims of extremely flawed and superficial writing and characters who leave no mark because they leave no mark? And yet it’s not that Anderson doesn’t try to give the story vitality and vitality, even going so far as to indulge in 1950s science fiction and UFOs, but Asteroid city it goes full circle straight from a calculated and overly theatrical beginning, with a naive rather than brilliant three-act division and an inability to deal with the rhythm and pacing of the narrative.
Soul is missing
Essentially, this is the problem of a lost soul, a film that forces the viewer to enjoy less expository and more subtle dialogue, a subtext that never calibrates because it operates almost exclusively on text. a jolt that shakes the strings of the heart, not just the eyes. There is no conscious madness Tenenbaumspoetry Moonrise Kingdompain The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissoubitter heart Rushmore. Everything in Wes Anderson’s cinema is now artificial, predictable and tired, as evidenced by the mediocre short film shown in Venice, which Asteroid city unfortunately, it has many common elements.
Wes Anderson as we knew and loved him is missing, and he’s still out there somewhere, because some small glimpses of him can still be seen even in Asteroid City. However, it’s not enough to rekindle the spark; it’s necessary to return to a movie that’s more about the gut than the head, in which the ubiquitous symmetry of frames is pushed aside to try to bring back some healthy artistic chaos. Of course, this was never a Wes Anderson movie. but what if the change was a decision to go back to being yourself again?
Asteroid city. Directed by Wes Anderson and starring Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe and Margot Robbie. in theaters Thursday, September 28, distributed by Universal Pictures Italia.
VOTE:
Two stars