"Asteroid City," Wes Anderson's half-irritating, half-intoxicating desert bloom of a movie, unfolds mostly in 1955 in a small Southwest town — a postcard-perfect oasis surrounded by cactuses, red rocks and vast horizons.
Our first glimpse of it is deeply transporting: No sounds break the silence, and no actors (or tumbleweeds) disrupt the vast spaces of Robert Yeoman's impeccably framed widescreen compositions. Instead, the camera nimbly rotates nearly 360 degrees, pausing mid-pan to register the glories of Adam Stockhausen's Wild Wild Wes production design: a diner, a motel, a filling station, a highway ramp to nowhere. That last one is a symbol: of unrealized promise, yes, but also of the-sky's-the-limit possibility.
Welcome to Asteroid City, a gorgeous piece of scenery even by Anderson's standards and an open-air museum of antiquarian delights, with its 40-cent milkshakes, vintage vending machines and pastel-hued automobiles. It is also, at this early stage, a museum happily devoid of visitors. Not that you'll mind when Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Tilda Swinton, Jeffrey Wright and other familiar and newly minted members of Anderson's company turn up, bringing with them a swirl of persnickety, precisely choreographed human activity. But there's something captivating about that early stillness: Asteroid City, we see, is not just a town but a carefully constructed set, and not just a carefully constructed set but the scaffolding for a typically elaborate formal and narrative conceit.
