In both positive and negative reviews of Asteroid City, the latest film from Wes Anderson, critics feel the need to evaluate it, primarily, by how much of a "Wes Anderson film" it is. Fellow filmmaker Paul Schrader praised it as, "The most Wes Anderson film Wes Anderson has made. And for that reason, the best." In his review for IndieWire, David Ehrlich said that, "Like any movie by Wes Anderson, Asteroid City is the epitome of a Wes Anderson movie."
Writing about the film for Variety, Owen Glieberman said, "It’s a film that no true Wes follower would miss. Yet it’s a movie lodged so far inside its own Wes Anderson-ness that it never comes out the other side. … it raises a question (or, at least, I’ll raise it): Is Wes Anderson still an entertainer, or is he becoming a fashion-victim fetishist of his own aesthetic? What you feel watching Asteroid City is Anderson doubling down on everything that has alienated viewers like me from so many of his films."
Asteroid City's admirers and detractors are both framing their discussions of Wes Anderson's movies against the rubric of Wes Anderson's past work, and Asteroid City isn't the first time this has happened. Throughout his career, writing about Anderson's work has frequently meant evaluating how much his latest project embodies or deviates from the aesthetic norm he has established for himself.
I’m tired of this being the primary lens we use to view Anderson’s work. I know it isn’t unusual to provide context in a review; to situate a new work within the artist’s broader oeuvre. When critics write about Bottoms next month, it will be natural to discuss the way that director and co-writer Emma Seligman has evolved since their debut, Shiva Baby, and the way her collaboration with star and co-writer Rachel Sennott has matured in the pair’s second outing together. When critics wrote about Nope, it was natural to question the ways that Peele’s thematic concerns had shifted or deepened since Get Out, how his dealing with race in America had changed and become more subtextual. It’s important to do this work, to provide context that readers might not have and help them better understand what they just watched, but there’s something different about the way we apply this method of critique to Anderson’s work.
Anderson is one of the few filmmakers whose sheer aesthetic vibrance seems to often shut down deeper critique. His style is so well-established that those writing about it use his name as a shorthand. Though his work frequently deals with themes of grief and loss, critics often treat his stylistic quirks as the only noteworthy thing about his films.
As a fan of his work, I find this deeply irritating. You can find good writing on Wes Anderson — Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Wes Anderson Collection series digs much deeper — but so much of the writing published around the release of a new film seems to have trouble moving beyond the symmetry, the cohesive color palettes, the snap zooms, the tilts and pans, the miniatures, the lovingly crafted sets. None of those elements of style amount to what Anderson has to say. Instead, they’re how he’s saying it. It’s as if an ASL interpreter didn’t bother translating the words someone was saying and instead described their hands. Anderson’s aesthetic is a tool he uses to get at the themes he’s exploring. We need to use it to look deeper.