Wes Anderson Has Gone Mad

To the casual observer, Wes Anderson might seem like someone who either refuses to read his own press or has bought into his press to an absurd degree. Those fussy arrangements, symmetric compositions, and precise tracking shots that have become the stuff of viral videos and snarky social-media memes aren’t going away. While other filmmakers might answer their critics by branching out and shaking things up, Anderson, like Federico Fellini before him, doubles down on his stylistic peculiarities. My colleague Alison Willmore (accurately) called his last effort, The French Dispatch, “the most Wes Anderson movie Wes Anderson has ever made.” One could probably say the same for each new Anderson film and certainly for the marvelous Asteroid City, which just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.