The French Dispatch - Review Thread

I like not love Royal Tannenbaums, HATED Life Aquatic, and have avoided the rest of his movies on the aesthetic alone.

This worth a shot?

Gratzie. I'll use those as my initial re-foray.

There was a lot more nudity than I expected.

There's a line from Benicio that I will lobby for a Golden Stake nomination.

The French Dispatch(11/6/2021)

There was a time when Wes Anderson looked like he was going to have to adjust his style a bit in response to a bit of a backlash that had been building. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou didn’t do great at the box office and it had seemed at the time like he’d spent too much on a movie that would ultimately only have a niche audience and The Darjeeling Limited is probably his least critically acclaimed movie. Moonrise Kingdom with its outdoor sets felt at the time like Anderson finally toning down his signature style a bit and moving, just a little bit, out of his heavily directed and intentionally artificial style. But that didn’t happen, instead with his next film The Grand Budapest Hotel he instead opted to give the middle finger to the haters and tripled down on his usual style and was rewarded for this with what is, by a very wide margin, the biggest box office hit of his career and several Oscar nominations. Since then he’s continued to target his films directly at the people who already dig his stuff rather than trying to dilute the style to make it more palatable for non-fans, first with his 2018 stop-motion effort Isle of Dogs and now with his latest film The French Dispatch which is even more purely Wes Andersonian than anything he’s made before.

The French Dispatch is essentially an anthology film which uses the fictional newspaper/magazine “The French Dispatch of the Liberty Kansas Evening Sun” as something of a framing device. That paper is pretty clearly meant to be a fictionalized version of “The Paris Review” and “The New Yorker” and is edited by Arthur Howitzer Jr (Bill Murray) and has an office in a fictional French city called Ennui. The film starts in 1975 with Howitzer death and that Howitzer had specified in his will that the paper should be shuttered after his death, so the film is framed as a farewell issue featuring his obituary and reprints of three of their best past articles, with those articles making up the three main portions of the anthology film. The first is reported by J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton) and focuses in on an art dealer named Julien Cadazio (Adrien Brody) who has discovered a painter named Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio del Toro) who is incarcerated in a hospital for the criminally insane after decapitating two people. The second appears to have been inspired by the events of May 1968 and has Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand) reporting on a student uprising led by a guy named Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet) and his even more militant girlfriend Juliette (Lyna Khoudri). And the third story is recited by Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) and looks at an elaborate crime story in which the son of a police commissioner (Mathieu Amalric) is kidnapped by a mastermind called The Chauffeur (Edward Norton).

Stylistically The French Dispatch pretty much picks up where The Grand Budapest Hotel left off. Like that movie this incorporates a variety of different aspect ratio and film formats but uses them all a bit more freely than that one did, basically rolling with whichever one seems right for a given scene or shot. This time around he periodically experiments with black and white, basically using it whenever a scene is set within on of the “articles” being referenced while switching to color during the “present” when people are in the Dispatch office looking back on these things or in sort of framing stories within framing stories like a lecture being given by the Tilda Swinton character or a TV interview being given by the Jeffrey Wright character, but sometimes it will just switch to color within one of these past-tense stories just for the hell of it and the film is also unafraid to just go wild and do something like incorporate traditional animation for an action scene. The film is very heavy on Wes Anderson’s meticulous and whimsical sets and probably uses his signature “ant farm perspective” dollhouse sets more than any other movie of his. I’m told this only cost $25 million to make but between the sheer size of the cast and the number of sets that must have been built to make this movie happen I have trouble believing that number. And this cast really is staggering. I mentioned a handful of the actors with larger-ish parts in my summery but by my count there are at least twenty reasonably famous actors in this thing (often in tiny roles) plus a decently impressive French cast.

Anthology films are an inherently tricky format to try to make work and when looking at movies with formats like that you kind of need to assess each part separately before seeing if they really cohere into a greater whole. I’d say the weakest element of the film is a short if kind of pointless travelogue segment featuring Owen Wilson which I think was intended to draw the audience into the world of the film but which I think just kind of slows down its momentum early. In fact it took some time for me to warm up to a lot of the main segments too but once they finally got into the swing of things I think all three of them were pretty successful. My favorite of the three is probably the first one, in part because I found Benicio del Toro’s performance very amusing and also thought its take on the commercialization of art had some legitimate teeth to it. The middle section I think will prove divisive as it has a certain affection for youthful radicalism as a concept while also satirizing it as ill-conceived bourgeois radical chic performance art more so than any kind of serious political endeavor. The third segment is the one that feels the least “French” of the three and feels the most like Wes Anderson just going on a bit of a romp with his usual stylistic tricks, but it is good at doing this and has some very fun set pieces towards the end.

These stories are of course linked by the overall magazine motif which is meant to be the film’s glue, a bit like how The Grand Budapest Hotel was supposed to be a sort of story within a novel but the framing story is even more important here given its anthology nature. At its heart it’s kind of meant to be an account of this fictional magazine’s staff and what they stood for and it does certainly get that across: you definitely have a feeling about what kind of stuff it was likely to publish. On a grander level the movie almost feels like a sort of elegy for a bygone world of letters and the kind of public intellectuals that emerged from it. That having been said, the glances we get at the actual French Dispatch office in the framing stories feel frustratingly limited. We get brief glimpses of actors like Elisabeth Moss and Jason Schwartzman there but hardly spend any time there and despite the film building him up as this critically important figure there we only get maybe five to ten minutes of Bill Murray. I think the film might have been better served had it started in on the main stories a bit quicker and spread the framing story out a bit more evenly instead of frontloading the movie with it and burning time on that Owen Wilson section. The individual segments though are mostly successful and Wes Anderson’s usual style is in good form. The film will not be winning over people who are skeptics of the director’s previous work but the fans will mostly enjoy it and I’m certainly a fan so it worked for me, but it’s probably shallower than some of his best work and it doesn’t necessarily break new ground for him.

**** out of Five

My opinion on Anderson films always seem to fluctuate with multiple viewings, but on the first go around I liked this one quite a bit. I liked how he experimented with different storytelling techniques and whathaveyou.

mhmm

I wore out my Blue Is The Warmest Color blu ray. They said you can’t do that but trust me, it’s possible.