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This review originally published in May out of the Cannes Film Festival.
We are recirculating it now thatAsteroid Cityis in theaters.
Theres a point to all this indulgence.
The regimented universe ofMoonrise Kingdomis sent into a spiraling decline by the mania of young love.
The Mitteleuropaisch candy-box milieu ofThe Grand Budapest Hotelis undone by the creeping evil of authoritarianism.
Asteroid Citytakes place in September 1955, at a mid-century moment when everything seemed possible.
(The time is never right.)
As in so many Anderson films, the kids are precocious introverts, while the adults are comically haunted.
(So, really, its a play within a play within a TV production within a movie.)
The Host reminds us that Asteroid Citydoes not exist.
It is an imaginary drama created expressly for the purposes of this broadcast.
The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication.
In other words, the story itself is a phantom, unknowable.
At various points, Anderson cuts back to the actors playing several of the aforementioned parts.
Not unlike the people theyre portraying, they too wrestle with their own fears of the unknown.
But in his lostness, we learn, lies the actors genius.
I cried like a baby.
And that, ultimately, is what makes him a great artist.
