The French Dispatch is Wes Anderson at his most pretentious, in a good way.
This cine-literary parfait experiments with mid-20th century modernism.
The Short Take:
The idiosyncratic genius of Wes Anderson is on full display in The French Dispatch, which is a cerebral feast for those with an appreciation for frame narratives and mixed media. What many critics call “peak Wes Anderson” will not have the broader appeal of fan favorites like The Grand Budapest Hotel or The Royal Tennenbaums, though.
The Long Take:
I’m a big Wes Anderson fan, but so are a lot of folks. There’s a quirkiness to his style and sense of humor. A parade of colorful characters played by five-star actors. But not everyone, I imagine, is the same kind of Wes Anderson fan. Some may be more into the family drama of a Royal Tennenbaums or Darjeeling Limited. Others may fancy the dollhouse/diorama antics of The Grand Budapest Hotel. Or maybe there are some who just like the animated stuff: Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs.
Anderson’s newest film, The French Dispatch, has prompted me to contemplate what I personally love about Wes Anderson films. While I’ve never watched one I didn’t like, my personal favorites, The Life Aquatic and The Grand Budapest Hotel, rate relatively high on the whimsical, goofy meter. But, more than any other film of his, The French Dispatch has made me realize that what I love most is Anderson’s writing — the unapologetically intellectual and awkwardly fanciful words, endlessly flowing from mouths of characters who either can’t stop talking or say nothing at all.
He’s a filmmaker that loves the written word, and this affair with all things literary is, in this case, the very premise of the film. Set in the fictional French city of “Ennui,” (hilarious) the film takes an anthology approach and tells three playful and occasionally poignant short stories, which are snapshots of writers working for the foreign outpost of a fictional newspaper, The Liberty Kansas Evening Sun.
Most press coverage of the film calls it “a love letter to journalism,” but I agree with those on The Next Best Picture podcast that say it’s actually not about journalism. It’s more specifically about a place, time, and kind of American in Paris thinker who has been lost to history. It’s The New Yorker circa 1950. It’s a distinguished list of ex-pat writers, some of which he explicitly thanks in the end credits. A small subset of the names on that list serve as models for specific characters: most notably James Baldwin and Mavis Gallant. The French Dispatch doesn’t adore journalists; it adores modernists.
More broadly, the vignettes all try to capture the mood, the feeling of what it was like to influence art, culture, and politics during this period in American and European history. We experience the stories through each writer’s point of view, but the stories themselves are about a Jackson Pollock-esque painter discovered in prison by a capitalist art dealer, a group of privileged and inexperienced students who ignite a political revolt, and a police station chef who achieves unprecedented culinary creativity while in pursuit of kidnappers. Literary, in Anderson’s terms, connotes a more expansive poetry of the senses and the mind.
As someone who enjoys literature and culture from this bygone era, I was probably going to enjoy this movie no matter what. But what really made me fall in love with it was Anderson’s ability to engage with the idea of a magazine as more than a written document, and how, through that thought process, he explores the possibilities and limitations of various forms of expression.
[There won’t be any spoilers in the traditional sense of giving away a twist or surprise, but I am about to go into more detail about what we see in the film, so if you haven’t seen it and want to maintain a sense of freshness in your viewing, stop here and come back after you’ve basked in the warm glow of dapper, retro-Euro nostalgia.]
The most visible example of this is when the third feature story shifts from live action to animation, but I can see these modal shifts everywhere in the film. During the painter’s story, we often switch from scenes in the prison with painter Moses Rosenthaler, played by Benicio del Toro, to Tilda Swinton’s character, an art historian giving a retrospective lecture on the painter. We see the contrast between a more academic approach to an artist and their work and a more personal version of the events behind the art. The two eventually collide and blend in a messy mix of memoir, art, and art history. The second tale, in which Frances McDormand’s Lucinda Krementz reports on the “chessboard revolution” at a local university, she mentions maintaining “journalistic neutrality,” but can’t help but help the students’ leader, played by Timothee Chalamet, write his manifesto. In the middle of the story, we switch to a scene from the play that “Mrs.” Krementz’s feature story later inspires. The overdramatized version of events, staged in a minimalist fashion, conjures memories of reading the works of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, or Eugene O’Neill in a Modern American Drama class. Again, the contrast made me ponder what certain formats can and can’t do for a story.
Image Credit: Harper’s Bazaar
And now that I’m writing about these shifts as a collection, I notice that perhaps the intersection of artistic medium-hopping and an inevitable mingling of journalism and memoir serves a larger theme: the inevitable abstraction of life when sifted through art. I’m then reminded of Joan Didion, who would have easily fit in with Anderson’s company of literary journalists. In her essay, “On Keeping a Notebook,” she says, “So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.” She goes on to say that what she writes is about how she felt at the time more than anything. Writing and art in The French Dispatch share this rejection of realism. When the art dealers stand around Rosenthaler’s painting titled “Simone, naked, Cell Block J Hobby Room,” they stare at the splashes of paint blankly. They know it looks nothing like the woman Rosenthaler loves — or any woman for that matter — but they know it to be beautiful (and profitable).
I suspect that in order to draw attention to this theme of modernism and the influence of form on content, Anderson tasked himself with a challenge: can I create a magazine in cinematic form? Can I create that same sensation of leafing through its pages, only with image and sound? I think he came as close as anyone could. The title cards with elaborately designed tableaus that, rather than introducing the title of the actual story, introduces the general subject of the section in which it would appear, like “the tastes and smells section” or “the poetry and politics section.” As a film that adopts a thought exercise, as a cinematic salon, it is extremely successful.
What I perceive as a triumph, though, is the very source of much criticism the film has received. Most critics praise the incredibly detailed production design and the overall aesthetic of the film, but complain that The French Dispatch isn’t vibrating on the same emotional frequency as Anderson’s past work. Since we break the run-time up amongst at least three separate narratives (arguably four, if you count Bill Murray’s character, editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. and the collective staff of the publication as a fourth story), we don’t have enough time to invest in any one of them.
While I did feel that way about Bill Murray’s Howitzer Jr. and Owen Wilson’s Herbsaint Sazerac (great name), “The Cycling Reporter,” I do not agree when it comes to the second and third segments with France’s McDormand’s Mrs. Krementz and Jeffrey Wright’s Roebuck Wright, whom we encounter years later on a 70s talk show, reciting an entire story he wrote years ago from memory. (Note the recurrence of a frame narrative yet again — the television interview tells one story while the story Wright tells within it also chronicles the foodie progenitor’s story, just from a different vantage point.) Krementz’s struggle with at once knowing exactly who she is — able to tell a young protestor what “grown-ups” do — while also showing vulnerability in being self-conscious about her age, looks, or loneliness, made me empathize and identify with her. The way she stares off past the camera in some shots made me both feel for her and want to cheer for her. And Jeffrey Wright, who I believe is new to Anderson’s rolodex of actors, absolutely stole the show with his deep, bittersweet, and introspective portrayal of a writer who goes on this insane, thrilling adventure, but still wants to cut out the best part of his story because it’s so sad.
Image Credit: GQ
While I personally made connections with some of these characters, I understand that the film in its totality might not be as emotionally stirring or as accessible as a film like The Grand Budapest Hotel, which, once you sift through all the escapist locales and finery, you can say it, at its core, is a boy meets girl story.
For me, though, this isn’t a detractor. It’s just what makes The French Dispatch different than most other films I will have seen by this year’s end, or possibly ever. I’m okay with it being a brain teaser more than a sweeping, heartfelt story. As the great Arthur Howitzer Jr. used to say, “Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” Who’s to say that Wes Anderson hasn’t done just that.