![]() ![]() ![]() Many of the movie’s scenes - the ones shot in color and widescreen, and set in the Southwest desert town of Asteroid - are framed as a play being performed for live television in the 1950s. If most of Anderson’s films deploy artificiality as a design principle, from the stylized costumes to the sets, this one draws constant attention to its own unreality to make a point about it. But Asteroid City is his most Brechtian effort yet, tucking one distancing device inside of another. Anderson has framed his stories as stories before, presenting them as chapters from a novel, passages from a memoir, and articles from a magazine. “Asteroid City does not exist,” announces a Rod Serling–like television host (Bryan Cranston) in the opening scene of the film, immediately foregrounding the fictionality of what we’re about to watch. For whatever else it is, Asteroid City plays like something of a manifesto, one that saves its most profound artist’s statement for its final minutes, when all the metatextual layers fold into each other. Yet this may also be the first time Anderson has implicitly addressed the (wrongheaded) criticism that his comedies are empty exercises in style, too archly artificial to mean anything. His latest film, Asteroid City, which hit theaters in June and begins streaming on Peacock this Friday, is every bit as storybook stylized as the filmmaker’s other pastel creations, with a deliberately flattened atomic-age aesthetic that’s somewhere between roadside-attraction billboard and Road Runner cartoon. Photo: Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection/©Focus Features/Courtesy Everetįor much of his career, Wes Anderson has weathered accusations that he doesn’t so much make movies as dioramas - little dollhouse exhibits as precious as they are precise. Asteroid City plays like something of a manifesto, one that saves its most profound artist’s statement for its final minutes. ![]()
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