The entertainingly familiar

Many directors have a style that accompanies most, if not all, of their work but no modern voice in cinema has as distinct or consistent a style as Wes Anderson. From The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou forward, Anderson's films have inhabited a slightly off-kilter fantasy world that is alternately charming, bemusing, and fascinating but never boring. His latest, Asteroid City, is no different in this respect. Set in the 1950s, the ideally kitschy age for an Anderson story, the film takes us through a science fair, some midlife crises, teenage discovery, postmortem grief, and first contact with at least semi-intelligent extraterrestrial life. Any one of those themes could have been central to an Anderson film and would doubtlessly have turned into an interesting story full of sly witticisms and quirky moments that you'd rarely see in most other directors' work. The fact that all of them were crammed into one story might be what makes this one feel slightly lacking when one lists the better films of his oeuvre.

It's at least mildly reassuring to know that it's not just Anderson fans who respect his work, as the list of actors that are piling into the tiniest of parts in his last two films (the previous being The French Dispatch) is beginning to become a story in and of itself. While City had a collection of those who are now Anderson regulars, like Scarlett Johansson, Adrien Brody, and Ed Norton, it also includes Tom Hanks, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, and Willem Defoe, among many others. Some of those marquee names had screen time in the range of two minutes or less. But this was apparently the chance to be "in an Anderson" and they took it, no matter how ephemeral the role. It's a fair question to ask at this point whether their popping up for a few seconds and being noticed by the audience is the entertainment of the moment or whether what they're saying and doing onscreen is supposed to be the focus in the traditional manner. When I think back to what I still regard as the pinnacle of his career, Moonrise Kingdom, I remember a film where virtually every character had an important role to play in the story and wasn't just a moving part of the scenery or a lever to move a scene from one spot to the next with a famous face attached. That latter state leaves many of them as not very memorable parts of the overall story. Indeed, among the most memorable characters are the trio of girls who are Augie's (Jason Schwartzman) daughters, Andromeda, Cassiopeia, and Pandora (the Faris triplets: Ella, Willan, and Gracie, respectively) none of whom received star credit but all of whom had more comedic and dramatic impact than many much more hallowed names.

All of that said, the star of the piece was definitely Johansson, who delivered what was probably her best performance since Lost in Translation. In the lighthearted world of Anderson, Midge was the character who was dryly poking holes in everything and getting everyone to admit that they knew there was more to the story and the world than what was being told to them. The fact that her daughter, Dinah (Grace Edwards) develops a relationship with Woodrow (Jake Ryan) at the same time that Midge and Augie are hooking up is just part of the symmetry that Anderson tends to embed in the worlds where it seems like random events are the order of the day. In a way, that's part of the point, in that all of those events, while symmetrical, are still random. That's, again, part of what gives his films their charm, because nothing seems planned, even though all of it is, meticulously. It's also worth noting Jeffrey Wright as General Grif Gibson and Bryan Cranston as the TV Host for lending the artificial gravitas that the rest of the cast spends their time orbiting around and often inadvertently defying. That, too, is part of the whimsy of Anderson's worlds and it's still an appreciable thing.

But in a way it's also the weakness of the film in that it's kinda the same thing that's been happening for 25 years now. It's still a treat for those of us that are fans, but it's the same treat that we've been getting for a long time and not nearly as delightful as it was at its height in films like Moonrise and The Grand Budapest Hotel. I don't think the formula has gotten tired, per se, but it also no longer carries the weight that it once did. Moonrise, while in that same vein of whimsy, was also a deeply emotional story of emotional discovery between two inhibited teenagers and the rediscovery of same by many inhibited adults. That kind of discovery story had a small part in City, but it was a very minor note in an otherwise patchwork quilt of themes. The impression that I walked out with wasn't the fascinating story of a place and population just slightly askew, but a director recycling his old material in an attempt to do something new which really wasn't. I don't want to say that it was tired because I didn't become bored or impatient or disinterested. I was chuckling basically the whole way through. But it felt almost too familiar; as if I'd seen it all before. That's not to say that it's a bad film or not worth seeing. It absolutely is. But in the same way as with Dispatch, I didn't walk out of the theater thinking that I'd seen something magical. It was just more Wes Anderson.

And that might be because of my overall perspective at the moment and not from any marked failing on the part of the film. I've been writing about this stuff for a long time, in the same way that I've been writing here and here for a long time. Lately, none of them are giving me the kind of return that I've always been hoping for. Well, honestly, none of them have turned into what I'd vaguely hoped for, which is landing a regular gig writing somewhere. But even doing it in the hopes that something might happen has begun to be less than what I'd usually expect. In other words, I'm not really enjoying it anymore and am giving serious thought to giving up on the idea of writing on a regular basis. I don't think I'm running out of things to say. I just feel like not enough people are particularly interested anymore, if they ever were. In a way, I'm kind of doing the same thing and it feels like only the usual suspects are paying attention; kinda like Wes Anderson's fans. So, I've been giving some serious thought to simply shutting down and moving on to something else. What that might be, I have no idea, but it certainly seems that writing for a living is not in my future after almost 40 years of trying. We'll see what happens next, I guess.