Asteroid City

Wes Anderson’s film opens in black and white, on a television stage, where a host (Bryan Cranston) introduces a play called Asteroid City and the man who wrote it, Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). Then the picture widens, the colour comes up, and we are inside the play: a one-street town in the American desert, some time in the 1950s, where a junior stargazers’ convention is about to give out its prizes. It is funny, it is built with a care that borders on the alarming, and for a long stretch in the middle we could not feel anything about it. It gets there, late.

Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a photographer, drives in with his teenage son, his three small daughters and a car that dies on arrival. He has not told the children that their mother is dead. Her father, Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks), arrives to disapprove of him. Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a film actress, takes the next cabin. General Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) makes speeches and Dr Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) runs the observatory. Then something comes down out of the sky during the ceremony, and the town is sealed.

Adam Stockhausen builds the town as a handful of flat-fronted buildings on one road: a diner, a filling station, a row of motel cabins, a motorway ramp that stops in mid-air, and a crater with a fence round it. Robert D. Yeoman and Tristan Oliver share the cinematography credit, and the desert is shot wide, in orange and turquoise and cream, under a sky that never changes; the television scenes are boxed in and grey. Milena Canonero puts the parents in pressed pastels and Midge in a black wig and a painted bruise. Mushroom clouds go up on the horizon and nobody looks for long. Barney Pilling cuts the camera’s sideways slides so that it moves and the people do not.

Schwartzman plays Augie with a pipe, a beard and a voice that never rises, and he makes the flatness read as shock rather than manner. Johansson does the film’s best work. Her scenes with Schwartzman, spoken through the facing windows of their cabins while she rehearses a part in her next picture, are the only time two people in this town seem to want anything from each other. Wright’s address to the children is a fine piece of military nonsense. Hanks plays the grandfather as a man who has been angry for so long it has become good manners. Brody, as the play’s director Schubert Green, gets two scenes in the grey half and takes both.

The trouble is the middle. Once the town is sealed, everybody waits, and Anderson’s idea of waiting is a run of short, level scenes in which the children trade facts and the adults trade silences. Title cards announce the act and scene, and Cranston steps in to tell us what we are watching. For about forty minutes we were bored, and then we were irritated at being bored by something so carefully made. Alexandre Desplat writes short, dry cues, mostly plucked strings, and keeps out of the way; the country songs on the jukebox do more of the work.

Then, in its last quarter of an hour, the film does something we will not describe, except to say that it involves an actor stepping out of his part to ask a question. It moved us more than the previous ninety minutes had prepared us for. The reason is plain: it is the first moment when the play and the stage need each other, when a man in costume grieving on cue and a man out of costume who does not know how to grieve are visibly the same person. Everything before it was a box; this is what was in it.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) had a story you could follow with the sound off; The French Dispatch (2021) was three short films in a folder. This has more of the second’s machinery and, for once, a centre to put it round, which is why it recovers and the earlier film did not. See it in a cinema if you can, where the width of the town matters and the grey scenes feel like the interruption they are meant to be; at home the two shrink to the same size. It runs 105 minutes and carries a 12A. It will not make converts and is not trying to. Take someone who already likes him, and sit through the middle.