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Anderson’s latest, finally released for the big screen, brings an underlying darkness to the director’s usual style.
Review by Tim Markatos
Everyone knows by now how they feel about Wes Anderson’s movies, and The French Dispatch is unlikely to win new converts or alienate the base. But those of us who have ever worked at, or written for, eccentric literary magazines (is there any other kind?) will find Anderson’s first foray into the genre of anthology film especially resonant.
Wes Anderson MVP Bill Murray, sporting a parabolic frown of astonishing steepness, plays Arthur Howitzer, Jr., the founding editor of the fictional magazine that gives the movie its title. We see and hear all about the American’s part in bringing this overseas publication to life, but from a narrative perspective Howitzer’s primary role is to die, thus setting the remaining staff on a mission to publish a final memorial issue reprinting some of the highlights from his tenure.
As all magazine editors know, sequencing is crucial. Rhythmically, The French Dispatch feels like an actual adaptation of a magazine, or perhaps the process of reading one. To help us get our bearings, Anderson prefaces the three main chapters of the film with a brief travel diary of Ennui-sur-Blasé, the fictional French environs of the periodical’s offices. (In the fictional bracket of French Dispatch character names—on which I’m now taking bets—Owen Wilson’s cycling travel writer Herbsaint Sazerac emerges as a strong early contender for the crown.) Ennui is an invention of typical Andersonian irony; its pop-up book charms belie a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it darkness, like the town’s consistent and statistically inexplicable annual count of bodies that turn up in the river, or a gang of schoolboys who, half-drunk on the Eucharist, terrorize the townsfolk after Mass (admittedly, your mileage may vary on how dark you consider the latter).
Each of the subsequent three stories follow a nested structure worthy of the narratives-within-narratives of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. At the outer level, Howitzer meets with the writer of each story in a brief scene to review their copy or question the items they filed for reimbursement. One level in, the writer recites or retells their story to a live audience some time after the story’s original publication, and at the innermost level the story itself plays out as originally told in writing. In the first chapter, “The Concrete Masterpiece,” J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton) delivers a lecture adapted from her story of the incarcerated abstract impressionist Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio del Toro), his prison guard and muse Simone (Léa Seydoux), and the art dealer Julian Cadazio (Adrien Brody). At once a romance and a screwball comedy, this chapter feels the most of a piece with Anderson’s past work. A comment from Cadazio about the role of the art dealer in selling new desires to the public brings to mind Anderson’s own rise as a distinctive brand.
The second chapter, “Revisions to a Manifesto,” places American reporter Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand) at the scene of a student protest led by the chess-playing, manifesto-writing young Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet) and his no-nonsense classmate Juliette (Lyna Khoudri). Krementz improbably starts sleeping with Zeffirelli and, while she’s at it, editing his manifesto, adding in a highly controversial appendix that drives a rift through the student body. I’m a little bit tired of both McDormand and Chalamet and thus couldn’t invest enough in this chapter even to care about the age gap. Between this and Dune, you could get a pretty good drinking game going out of movies where people crack a sarcastic joke about Chalamet’s musculature.
The final chapter, “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner,” features Jeffrey Wright as food critic Roebuck Wright, recounting for a TV audience his story of a high-stakes hostage crisis resolved with the help of legendary police chef Lt. Nescaffier (Steve Park). Within the story is a touching subplot wherein Howitzer makes his only intra-narrative appearance, showing up in prison to bail out an incarcerated young Wright on the condition that he produce a book review by sunrise to prove his mettle as a writer.
For all its giddy aesthetic delights, The French Dispatch is unusually preoccupied with darkness.
Like in the New Yorker, from which Anderson drew inspiration, the stories in The French Dispatch find resonances with each other that elevate the whole (I can’t call them unexpected resonances because, obviously, they were each written by the same writing team of Anderson, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, and Hugo Guinness). And just as the art direction of the New Yorker is key to its coherence and iconicity, Anderson’s aesthetic choices give the film a visual imprint that further tie its chapters together. While the stories are shot in black and white, with bookends and metatextual asides in color, Anderson toggles between the two within narratives, and sometimes even within a scene, to underline emotionally significant moments, upend our perceptions of time and memory, or sometimes just to have fun. Subtitles stack themselves vertically and dangle off the edge of the frame, which itself expands and shrinks with abandon. A car chase in the third chapter is animated in the style of high-quality webcomics, a clever way to avoid having to track down vintage automobiles and hire the municipal police to shut down the city for a weekend.
But for all its giddy aesthetic delights, The French Dispatch is unusually preoccupied with darkness. Policing and incarceration are features of nearly every story; violence breaks out in all three chapters; and, in a disconcertingly brief aside in the first chapter, Swinton’s character reveals that a character from her story raped her. Feeling out of place, whether because one is an American reporter in France or a Black homosexual male in a Wes Anderson movie, is a shared sentiment between characters in all three chapters.
At the close of the third chapter, before an endnote where the Dispatch staff assemble to mourn their departed editor and collaborate on his obituary (sans tears, in accordance with his strict “no crying” policy), Howitzer reviews Wright’s piece and fishes out of him a closing paragraph that Wright had scrapped before filing. Wright and Nescaffier, the only nonwhite characters of note in an otherwise white story, bond over their shared status as foreigners and trade wistful hopes that they may someday get a taste abroad of beautiful things they could never find at home. “That’s the whole thing!” Howitzer exclaims, and insists that Wright add the grace note back in. It’s a moving sequence in its own right, but also one that reflects back on Anderson’s liberality as a filmmaker: No darlings were killed in the making of this movie.
Tim Markatos is a designer and film critic who lives in Washington, D.C.
The French Dispatch was directed by Wes Anderson and released by Searchlight Pictures on October 22, 2021. It can be seen in theaters.
