Scarlett Johansson stars in “Asteroid City” because the fictional Fifties movie star Midge Campbell, one of many quite a few people who discover their strategy to the titular small U.S. desert city for a Junior Stargazer conference circa 1955. Recalling the framing units in “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The French Dispatch,” nevertheless, the primary storyline in “Asteroid City” is definitely a story being advised by others inside the film’s real-world setting. As /Film’s Lex Briscuso explains in her evaluate of “Asteroid City” from the Cannes Film Festival, the movie is “a play within a teleplay within a film” that is narrated by a retro anthology tv sequence host performed by Johansson’s fellow “Isle of Dogs” voice actor Bryan Cranston.
“It’s a movie about a television show doing a story on a theater,” Cranston advised THR, including, “And I think it’s Wes’ love letter to performance art. He’s wrapped his arms around the three major mediums we are involved in.”
That’s nothing uncommon, after all. Anderson has been embracing the intentionally heightened artifice of theater manufacturing design for nearly his complete profession, whereas movies like “The French Dispatch” have additionally seen him combine the aesthetics of retro tv into his repertoire. If something, he is solely leaned additional away from realism and deeper into pure formalism over time, refining his craft with every new movie. Feel whichever means you need about his work, however no person makes Wes Anderson films like Wes Anderson does — as we’re reminded each time one other Wes Anderson “parody” goes viral on-line.