The French Dispatch opens with a tray of cocktails, prepared in front of a building and then delivered to a room filled with journalists. What sounds like a perfectly bland exercise belies the complex mechanics shown onscreen, from the tight shot of painstaking mixology, to the cuckoo-clock-like precision of stiff drinks lifted vertically on a dumbwaiter and then through the winding interiors of an office building. The mundane task of transporting some potent potables from here to there is presented with such exactitude, something akin to a Rube Goldberg contraption, that the maximalist message it conveys is clear and unapologetic.
Wes Anderson’s latest opus, number 10, is by far his most aesthetically singular and extreme. It shifts from a striking pastel palette to black-and-white and back again. It switches aspect ratios abruptly. It twice swaps live-action footage with animated sequences. It substitutes a traditional flashback sequence with a full-on theatrical restaging of a past event. It showcases one symmetrical tableau after another, impeccable “living pictures” of statue-still, camera-facing figures. This last flourish, in particular, has become a directorial hallmark many viewers have long pointed to with an equal degree of admiration and derision. The French Dispatch won’t settle any disputes about Wes Anderson or his unique artistic sensibility. If anything, it’ll further widen the gap between fans and detractors.
His new film focuses on the fictional magazine of its title, which is staffed with American ex-pat writers in 1975. They’re based in the made-up French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé (translation: Boredom-on-Blasé). We witness a dramatized version of its final issue, including the breezy decisions made by a prickly yet beloved editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray). His death, revealed early into the picture, also leads to the demise of the Dispatch, his family’s publication.
The French Dispatch is, mostly, an anthology of three main narrative installments. Each wonderful episode represents, in its own way, the experience of reading a wildly different article from the magazine’s ultimate issue. The first and best of these – featuring the excellent trio of Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody and Léa Seydoux – is called “The Concrete Masterpiece,” a story about a homicidal genius (Benicio del Toro) who becomes the toast of the contemporary art world.
The middle section, “Revisions to a Manifesto,” centers on a young revolutionary (Timothée Chalamet) and the Dispatch journalist (Frances McDormand) covering him. She soon finds herself taking on different roles, such as his lover and, most importantly, his copy editor. The concluding piece, titled “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner,” is an outright caper. It stars the superb Jeffrey Wright (portraying a loose version of James Baldwin), and echoes Anderson’s previous forays into the genre (see: The Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Grand Budapest Hotel).
The French Dispatch can appear impenetrable and cold when compared to Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel. Its nesting-doll structure often seems deliberately hard to follow. The Dispatch editor’s fundamental dictum – “No Crying” – is usually respected. Anyone demanding easy narratives and gushing emotions from Wes Anderson’s latest project has largely missed the point. The film is an elegy dedicated to long-gone New Yorker luminaries such as Harold Ross, William Shawn, James Thurber and E.B. White. The death, mourned here, isn’t a one-to-one proxy of the New Yorker itself. That magazine still exists, and it’s thriving. The heart, instead, breaks a little bit for the deep coffers that once bankrolled the wayward and far-flung reporters fictionalized in The French Dispatch, funds that have long since dried up.
Apart from Wes Anderson’s own oeuvre, The French Dispatch most recalls Tom Rachman’s incredible debut story collection The Imperfectionists from 2010. That tome takes place in a very real Rome, rather than a fake French city. And yet it similarly presents the steady decline of an English-language periodical, headquartered abroad, in an episodic manner. The cumulative effect on the reader is both joyous – it offers a golden vision of an old way of reporting – and wistful, because it makes the corner-cutting of today feel ersatz and lesser.
Say what you will about Anderson’s formal cartwheels in The French Dispatch. Its parceled storytelling structure at least allows for a supreme assortment of secondary and tertiary cast members (such as Owen Wilson, Elisabeth Moss, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston, Bob Balaban, Christoph Waltz, Liev Schreiber, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe and Saoirse Ronan). The film will perplex many, and rub others the wrong way. So it goes. For those of us whom it strikes a chord, three distinct notes will harmonize and then reverberate loudly.
Photo courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures
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