Has Wes Anderson gone too Wes with Asteroid City?
All this is delightful but curiously depthless, and you may exit the cinema feeling as if you’ve been trying to survive on a diet of macaroons. If there’s a theme or resonant emotion poking through the tissue-paper, it is the age-old Anderson chestnut of the struggle between brainiac kids and their heedless, uncomprehending parents. “Are we orphans now?” one of Schwartzman’s kids asks. “Are you planning to abandon us?” Long pause. “I was considering it,” he admits, sheepishly. It’s the theme Anderson dealt with best in The Royal Tenenbaums, the last film of his that dug down into something that exceeded or escaped the director’s exquisitely manicured designs. There were shards of genuine pain — Richie’s suicide attempt, Margot’s chain-smoking in the bathroom — glinting amid the pink and amber production design.
