I’ve had it with Wes Anderson

After the screening I attended of Wes Anderson’s latest, Asteroid City, I overheard a couple of critics saying how much they loved his films and what a genius he is, and I was minded to interrupt with: “What, even though he’s been making exactly the same film for years now?” Or: “What, even though I kept waiting for it to take a shape and it never did?” But I was too shy, so I’ll let it all out here. The problem with Wes Anderson films, it now occurs to me, is that they are Wes Anderson films, and my patience has run out.

Asteroid City is a film set within a play that, in turn, is set within a TV documentary, and if this sounds confusing, it’s probably because it is. It has a starry cast that’s not just longer than your arm but longer than the arm of someone who say, has such long arms it’s freakish and they’ve had to join the circus. The cast includes Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Matt Dillon, Margot Robbie, Steve Carell, Edward Norton and Rupert Friend. Apparently, it also includes Jarvis Cocker in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role but I blinked and missed it. Either that, or I was dozing, which would have to be likelier. I don’t know how Anderson attracts such A-listers. What does he have on them?

The late film critic Roger Ebert once said that Anderson suffered from “terminal whimsy” and it does seem to be incurable and getting worse. The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch… pure whimsy featuring a deadpan comic tone, an exaggerated palette of colors, highly stylized production design, a lateral-moving camera and fetishized retro objects at the expense of any plot development or taking the characters anywhere that might matter. And no amount of vintage luggage (or quirky fonts) can make up for that.

This one is set in the 1950s with a playwright (Norton) writing a play about a group of people who travel to a one-horse town, Asteroid City, in the Arizona desert where a meteor once landed, while a TV host (Cranston) is presenting a show about it. Anderson must always frame his films to make it clear they’ve been staged. Several families converge in Arizona to gaze at the skies and compete in some kind of science competition. However, their activities are interrupted by the arrival of an actual alien (Jeff Goldblum: I forgot to say), after which a general (Wright) keeps the attendees on site under quarantine. Among them are Midge Campbell (Johansson), a Hollywood femme fatale rehearsing a script; Augie Steenbeck (Schwartzman), a recent widower and war photographer with four children; Stanley Zak (Hanks), Augie’s father-in-law; and many more, all of whom arrive with vintage luggage in vintage cars but not while wearing goggles and parp-parping the horn even if I kept expecting it.

What happens? Midge and Augie have a fleeting affair and he takes a naked photo of her (this does not follow my rule that for every naked woman in a film there should be a naked man), but as it means nothing to either of them it means nothing to us. I kept trying to give it shape. Is it about grief? Augie waited three weeks to tell his children their mother had died, for instance, but that doesn’t go anywhere either. Maybe we’re not meant to feel anything. I suppose you could argue (she says grudgingly) that it’s ironic, that it’s about emotional detachment and that we are meant to feel as disconnected as the characters are. The trouble with this is that it does make for a long one hour and forty minutes.

Anderson is an auteur with a distinctive artistic voice but it is, surely, time he found something to say with it.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.