The French Dispatch, the latest from auteur director Wes Anderson, is an anthology film that takes place in Ennui-sur-Blasé, a fictional 20th century French town. The Dispatch is an outpost of an American newspaper owned and edited by Bill Murray’s Kansas-born Arthur Howitzer, Jr., its contents written by a host of colorful writers and brought to life on screen by equally colorful characters (all played by a very familiar ensemble cast). Often coined as a love letter to old-school journalism and an especial ode to The New Yorker, the film consists of three central stories framed by a (too brief) prologue “written” and told to us by the utterly charming cycling reporter Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson) and an epilogue about Howitzer’s – and thus the newspaper’s – death.
If this introduction sounds like a lot, you’re not wrong. Anderson himself reportedly had a difficult time explaining what his movie was actually about. You can turn yourself into pretzels trying to summarize it because it’s the kind of film you just have to see to start to understand. And even then, you’ll be hard pressed to really understand. In its style, subject matter and overall tone, this is the most “Anderson” of his catalog – great news for fellow Anderson fans, but not for novices. Some critics view this film as too stylized, a bit cold, and too arcane for the layperson. It’s certainly not as accessible as Rushmore or Fantastic Mr. Fox, and I left the theatre after a second viewing with absolutely certainty that I missed plenty of jokes, puns, and cultural references. Regardless, Anderson’s world is a distinctly and oddly fun world to explore and get lost in. And because his world is recognizable from film to film, there’s a certain comfort in knowing it exists.
Anderson’s stamp as an auteur is clear from the opening shots on the dollhouse-like Dispatch building. We see one of the newspaper staff preparing Howitzer’s drinks for the day and proceeding to climb multiple exterior staircases to the editor’s office. The film crew had found and used a derelict felt factory in Angouleme, France, the perfect home for the kind of sets that Anderson seems to love using. As in his other films, each set is a conscious extension of the characters that move and live in it.
Similarly deliberate are his framing and camera movements. The mise en scene is calculated and precise, each an art piece with layers of details. Ironically, they do not seem too stagey but instead full of energy. The tracking shots in the cycling prologue follow Sazerac with gusto. “The Concrete Masterpiece” nicely juxtaposes slower movements as love emerges between the prisoner Moses Rosenthal (Benicio Del Toro) and his guard, Simone (Léa Seydoux) with faster cuts and tracking as Julien Cadazio (Adrian Brody) attempts to seal an art relationship between the prisoner and the outside, shallow art world. The static mise en scene at the café and in the bathroom in “Revisions to a Manifesto” perfectly capture the “ennui” of the town itself.
Each of the three central stories is primarily shot in beautiful black and white. Color exists in these stories to signal some emotional change. In the first story, “The Concrete Masterpiece”, we are treated to brilliant splashes of color when Anderson wants to highlight the artwork; in “Revisions to a Manifesto”, the more emotionally charged or romantic scenes are filmed in his trademark saturation; in “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner,” the story transforms into a colorful cartoon in its climatic chase scene conclusion.
Anderson no doubt has a deep love for each character he brings to life. He even dresses certain foxes in his own brown corduroy jacket. If his characters walked into another of his films, I imagine they would be completely at home. There are, in fact, direct callbacks to the floral tent interior in Moonrise Kingdom and to the fluorescent-lit robin egg blue kitchen table in Fantastic Mr. Fox that seem completely plausible in this new fantastical realm. The characters in The French Dispatch are just as quirky and loving as those in his other movies – there are just a lot of them. And some are, disappointedly, only on screen for moments. On a personal side note, I was thrilled to see both Christoph Waltz whose role in Inglorious Basterds is all at once terrifying and amusing and Alex Lawther who effortlessly plays the lead role of James in End of the F***ing World. But with more than 35 actors to keep track of, it’s a dizzying array. This is the film’s only downfall. The anthology framing works to an extent but because each story could be a novella rather than an article, and by extension, a film in and of itself, there’s almost too much information. I found myself wanting more of the implausible but sweet love story in “The Concrete Masterpiece” though I very much enjoyed the other two stories. Frances McDormand and Timothée Chalamet are a lovely duo of wits in “Revisions to a Manifesto”. “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner” with Jeffrey Wright as Roebuck Wright, a writer/narrator with a photographic memory, is at its core not about a kidnapped son but about two men who are foreigners in their world, a world which is at times so painful, it may be less hurtful to see it as the literal cartoon it becomes.
On the whole, this film is as spiral as the staircase the waiter has to climb in the opening sequence. But it’s also a lovely romp through the writer’s mind. Indeed, it’s a treat to see the “written” word come to life in such a unique way. And while it may be full of erudite references and a bit over stylized, it’s not a bad place to be. To live in Anderson’s Futura font-captioned world for a couple of hours is the sweetest “kind of different” and that’s more than okay by me.
Rated R with a run time of 1 hr 47 min
