There’s a moment of innocent lunacy in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City where a little boy named Dwight (one of the many school children quarantined in the titular city in the middle of nowhere after an alien encounter) sings a song he wrote (with the help of some friendly cowboys) called “Dear Alien” that just might be my favorite scene ever in a Wes Anderson film.

There are a lot of parts…speaking parts, acting parts, singing parts, silly parts, sad parts, car parts, hair parts…in Asteroid City…an otherwise “lean and skinny” movie, much like the alien that appears and is later sung about, that runs about 1 hour 45 minutes. But man, is it jampacked with minutia, both of the typically Andersonian visual kind and of thought.

There’s a meta narrative, that oddly brought to mind both Birdman and Irma Vep more so than any previous Anderson work, about a 1950s tele-documentary about the behind the scenes of a 1950s stage play called Asteroid City. Some of these meta moments – in black and white – are more compelling than the main attraction, but the main attraction also contains some moments of kidwild absurdity allowing the two sides of this wacky yet sad coin to serve as strange tonics to each other. I didn’t expect the roadside philosophy, nor the minor study of grief and loss. And there are layers…like Scarlett Johansson (who once played an alien in an even weirder Jonathan Glazer film) playing both an actress and an actress playing an actress…in a play about an alien…or the aliens we all are to each other. But it’s all played through the eyes of children, either in the physical or stunted-emotional sense.

The result is film that looks like a Wes Anderson film, but feels like something a little different…something sad and innocent, artificial yet true, and even a little weirder than usual. The perfect Alexandre Desplat score matches the film note for note and is the composer’s best work since Birth. The result is like a David Lynch film directed by a precocious and naive child who is equal parts obsessed with movies and science. It’s a strange little piece of insular fiction writ large against an obsessively detailed ode to popular entertainments. Yet there’s still the Anderson undercurrent of family units (either real or makeshift) being put into comically absurd or comically sad traps where his meticulous and sturdily framed set pieces just barely hold them together. It might also be first Wes Anderson film since The Royal Tenenbaums that contains moments I actually loved instead of just interesting, cute, or melancholy curios. The whole of Asteroid City likely does not equal the sum of those parts…but those parts are still both beautiful and strange.

Review by D. H. Schleicher