By Tyler Gibson

Wes Anderson is firmly established as one of contemporary cinema’s most vital and identifiable artists. In an era of drab color grading and over-reliance on medium shots, his movies look and behave the way movies should. However, despite his recently prolific crossover success from art house to the mainstream, I’ve been indifferent to this hot streak. While the common criticisms aimed at him are usually surface-level and misreads regarding his style serving as substance, I haven’t been deeply moved since 2009’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” I am happy to report Asteroid City is Wes Anderson’s finest, most delightfully purifying film in over a decade and a healthy reminder of why we’ve all become so smitten with the deadpan master of grief comedy.

There’s a looseness to Anderson’s 11th film lacking in the deflating The French Dispatch and the fussy The Grand Budapest Hotel, which remains his biggest all-around hit. The steady screenplay still implements a nesting doll structure. Still, the subject being stage theatrics proves ardent and thoroughly realized-perfectly in sync and insightfully commenting on the director’s devotion to formalism. Asteroid City is immediately revealed to be a play orchestrated by a ragtag gang of collaborators, all making amends with their artistic and personal processes. The space itself is also about a ragtag team of collaborators making amends with not only creative and emotional techniques but scientific, as well. Anderson’s characters burrow themselves in abundantly curated and hermetic prisons (hence the waterproof production design and compartmentalized axis framing) where art, science, politics, and sexuality intersect. Exploration will eventually emerge as self-discovery and therapeutic. Even the alien creature within the movie demonstrates an ironic inquisitiveness against spectatorship! The children in the ensemble weaponize their love and knowledge of the vastness of space as a means for connection and opposing conformity put upon them by adults and society. Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson are actors reconciling the sense and meaning of the painfully strange nature of performance. A morbidly hysterical running gag involves Scarlett’s immersive method of acting tactics to better understand an upcoming role’s tragic backstory. This conjures a testimonial spirit, which may seem distancing and off-putting, but the playwright’s driving force crafts a thriving modesty.

Asteroid City is a wise move of sharp humor and indispensable melancholy. It’s the best approximation of Wes Anderson’s talents. [B+]