Possibly the best thing to come out of lockdown – including that sourdough starter we finally mastered – Wes Anderson’s ’50s quarantine tale plays like the American auteur’s whimsical, surrealist answer to The Twilight Zone relocated to the dusty desert of the old West. Happily, for a filmmaker whose signature style can sometimes feel archly distancing, feeling as well as fancy courses through Asteroid City. It’s his most bittersweet film about family since The Royal Tenenbaums and hands-down his best since The Grand Budapest Hotel.
The setting is the fictional desert town of Asteroid City – although in a meta twist, it’s actually the setting of a TV play that’s unfolding in film form, written by Ed Norton’s legendary playwright, Conrad Earp, and narrated with an enjoyably raised eyebrow by Bryan Cranston. It sits halfway between Parched Gulch and Arid Plains deep in John Ford country, but it’s a place that could only emerge from Anderson’s ludicrously fertile imagination. Monument Valley’s rock formations and perfect, emoji-like cacti adorn the painterly matte backdrop as A-bomb tests detonate serenely in the distance in cotton-wool mushroom clouds. Welcome to ‘Once Upon a Time in the Wes’.Here, among the symmetrical cabins, martini vending machines, toy-set gas and train stations and one giant asteroid crater, his rich assembly of characters gather under the baking Arizona sun to flirt, grieve, bicker and ultimately wait endlessly when a Junior Stargazer convention is inter