Hollywood squares: "Asteroid City"

I'll confess to chuckling sporadically during 2021's The French Dispatch, a mid-period, mid-ranking Wes Anderson at which several of the most ardent Wesheads sniffed disdainfully. But don't get me wrong: I still regard this filmography as akin to the act of reconstructing cathedrals out of matchsticks, or carving Christ's face into a ham. I get what it's doing; it's just the intended effects remain mostly lost on me, and I can't see why people go quite as wild as they do over something that continues to strike these eyes as inherently marginal, bordering on trivial. Still, if all that's now left of American screen comedy is starry dioramas loaded with overrehearsed whimsy, perhaps we shouldn't be too down on them - and The French Dispatch featured enough leftfield performers to put hipster bums on seats and thereby enable Anderson to fashion another film-in-a-bottle. (Increasingly, I get the same feeling watching this director's films as I do sitting through Woody Allen's recent output: that this is filmmaking born of compulsion, subject to diminishing returns and laughs, and ever more reliant on the cast to do whatever heavy lifting there is.) With Asteroid City, Anderson has plainly decided what his work needs isn't greater depth, but more framing - that it needs to get fiddlier and more finicky still. At its centre is an orange-hued Panavision survey of life in a 1950s desert town - diner, motel, gas station; mechanic, schoolmarm, bugle boy, space cadet; pure Americana, in other words - as it experiences its first flashes of extraterrestrial activity. Yet this jolly little sketch is bookended and interrupted by square-framed monochrome bulletins from the preparations for and filming of a Marty-style play for TV, featuring many of the same actors in a variation of the same roles. By now, you'll know whether or not this frequency merits investigation; all I can add is that agnostics, sceptics and outright non-believers are unlikely to be won over by a Wes Anderson film that is 37.2% more arch than the norm.

Take a good hard look through those arches, and it becomes clearer how Anderson, the prep-school prodigy to Tarantino's enfant terrible, has been indulged by producers and critics alike. For starters, no-one's thought to push him on how all his moving parts connect. Whether or not you found it amusing, The French Dispatch was all of a piece: it took the form of a newspaper or some other digest, and set out to tell the stories that might fill that space. Here, there's no immediate way of telling how the colour and black-and-white elements relate, just a vague understanding we're watching the same story being articulated in two different styles. (One is boxy and urban, the other rural and expansive.) This is ambitious, certainly, and it may draw in anyone with an interest in the differences between American film, television and theatre in the 1950s - but even here we seem to be re-entering Jesus Ham territory, and again Anderson starts to resemble the child at a wedding, attempting to pull focus with a handstand. The framing is nothing if not considered, and unquestionably seizes the eye; but faced with the humdrum material within, the mind starts to wander. There are jokes tucked away within Asteroid City, like the daredevil witnessed devouring a hot pepper in one scene and dashing into the background of an adjacent set-up to avail himself of the watercooler. Yet they're forever too storyboarded to be as surprising - thus funny - as one would like them to be, and they're most often crowded out by tics, quirks, namedrops, rampant self-referentiality, familiarly Andersonian distant fathers, and characters penned into split screens or open windows like products on sale in a vending machine. (One place to which my mind wandered: considering the whereabouts of Jared and Jerusha Hess, who - in Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre and Gentlemen Broncos - filled not dissimilar framing with character development and identifiable gags, and thereby circumvented Anderson's flatness of affect.) The craft is as on point as ever, and the performers as expressive as they can be within the straitjacket of playing characters in a Wes Anderson movie. (An area of residual fascination: watching Tom Hanks trying to bring some of his usual naturalism and humanity to bear on a film that has no place for them, that would prefer to trade exclusively in mannerism.) Yet the net result is that I tittered and snickered less at Asteroid City than I did at The French Dispatch, and came away confirmed in at least one core critical belief: how enfeebled American cinema must be in the 21st century, when its pre-eminent cheerleaders have felt obliged to talk this auteurist juvenilia up as a major aesthetic, worthy of endless praise, study and reiteration.

Asteroid City is now showing in cinemas nationwide.