Peak-Andersonian whimsy, or self-parodying flimsy?

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This article was published 01/04/2023 (1257 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This week I stumbled across an image on my YouTube feed. It was a split-screen representation of two men, featuring a lot of yellow and the words “Asteroid City.” I hadn’t had my morning coffee yet, and my first fuzzy thought was that it looked very Wes Andersonian.

A little caffeine and a closer look, and I realized it wasn’t just Andersonian. It was actually Wes Anderson, and this was the first trailer for his new movie, due out in theatres this July.

Getting out my trusty Wes Anderson bingo card (generated by Slate back in 2012), I played the 146-second trailer and managed to hit quite a few squares. Even a brief glimpse of Asteroid City contains bathrobes, symmetrical framing, stylish neckwear, yellow titles, overhead shots, a tan suit jacket, an “amusement vehicle,” and Jason Schwartzman.

So far, the Wes Anderson community seems split on this cinematic amuse-bouche, unable to decide whether this trailer hits pure peak Anderson or sails past it into smug self-parody.

Set somewhere in the American southwest in 1955, the story centres on a Junior Stargazer convention that is interrupted by some kind of spectacular world event.

That seems to be the big picture, but — as usual — fans of America’s most immaculate auteur are homing in on the details.

Some specialist viewers are already in a tizzy over fonts. Anderson favours Futura and Helvetica with occasional flourishes of Tilda, but the typeface used for Asteroid City’s title and cast list seems less obvious, which has design nerds buzzing.

And speaking of cast lists, this one just goes on and on, a compendium of the filmmaker’s familiar favourites (Willem Dafoe, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Tony Revolori), some Anderson newbies (Tom Hanks and Margot Robbie) and a lot of promising youngsters.

The characters’ deadpan emotional undertones hint at recurring Anderson obsessions: absent parents, immature adults and preternaturally mature children. It’s a sign of just how long Anderson has been working that Jason Schwartzman — who played Max Fischer, the original precocious Andersonian adolescent, in 1998’s Rushmore — is now a flailing grown-up, a middle-aged father who has somehow neglected to tell his four kids their mother has died.

There are three little girls who, like so many Anderson children, are silent, self-contained and given to wearing whimsical costumes, and an adolescent son (Jake Ryan) who seems like the second-generation iteration of Max, being anxious, brainy and hopelessly in love with a probably unattainable young woman.

Anderson — no surprise here — dives right into his super-stylized period setting, with impossibly turquoise skies playing against the ochre desert and retro-futurist doodads that include endearingly homemade ray-guns and jet-packs. That ’50s look is underscored by an atmosphere that combines space-race pep with an oddly cheery version of nuclear paranoia and alien-invasion fear.

Now, because Anderson’s films are so visually fab — often resembling intricate little dioramas or immersive Technicolor View-Master scenes — they always make for great trailers. It’s when they stretch into feature length that things can get tricky.

With the 10 films in the Wes Anderson Cinematic Universe, I zing between ardent adoration and active dislike, and it’s a fine line between these states, since elements I find utterly charming in one movie can seem insufferably twee in another.

I don’t yet know which way this new film will go for me, but I do know that come July, I’ll be heading to Asteroid City, just to see what happens.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca