Exploring Wes Anderson's 'Asteroid City': A Review

Wes Anderson's latest film, Asteroid City, provides a skeleton key that unlocks not only this particular movie but Anderson's entire body of work. The film is a televised production of a play about the making of a play, and the vast majority of it takes place within the last of those frames. Anderson's movies aren't emotionless, but they don't traffic in cathartic weeping or treacly catharsis. Sorrow is just something his characters learn to live with, like the piece of battlefield shrapnel permanently embedded in Augie Steenbeck's skull.