The French Dispatch: Wes Anderson, Beaucoup Trop
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-
Equal parts clever and annoying, Wes Anderson’s latest film is akin to being locked in a holding cell with a team of cellmates suffering from florid cases of logorrhea. They might be smart, but it would be a relief if they would just shut up or at least slow down occasionally.
The film is directly inspired by the director’s love of the almost century-old New Yorker weekly magazine, here re-imagined as The French Dispatch, an offshoot of a European bureau of the fictional Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun newspaper. The publication is under the auspices of its founder/editor Arthur Howitzer Jr., played by Bill Murray, whose motto is “Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.”
The film follows several stories of the eccentric literary journalists and their American visions of French culture, in stories of spiralling digression, delving into stereotypical aspects of French life — eccentric artists, student uprisings, fine cuisine and police dramas. It’s linguistically complex (lots of voiceover) and, as expected, visually elaborate; a pop-up book fantasy that morphs into animation, black-and-white and colour, with a couple of dozen famous actors in small and larger parts, all cogs in its many spinning wheels.
There are three central stories.
“The Concrete Masterpiece” is delivered as a lecture by Tilda Swinton as JKL Berensen, a fine art critic with a Margaret Thatcher wig, lisping dentures, and a mid-Atlantic accent. She tells the story of an outsider artist (Benecio Del Toro) — who is discovered in a prison asylum for the criminally insane by a fellow prisoner, an art dealer doing time for tax evasion (Adrien Brody) — and his prison guard muse (Leá Seydoux). The artist becomes a prime example of a succès de scandale, whose work and art, like Edouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe or Richard Strauss’s Salomé, triggers a social shockwave.
In “Revisions to a Manifesto,” Frances McDormand stars as a middle-aged journalist covering the student revolutionaries of the late sixties, who loses her journalistic objectivity and her heart to a young firebrand (Timothée Chalamet) in a piece that owes a debt to mid-sixties Jean-Luc Godard, including the 1967 satire La Chinoise, a title name-checked on a hair salon in the film.
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The final segment, “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner” — starring Jeffrey Wright as a gay, James Baldwin-like journalist on a 1960s interview show talking about what sounds like an A.J. Liebling obscure gastronomy piece — is the most complex… to the point of near incoherence, mingling a French policier about the kidnapped brilliant son of a gourmand police commissioner (Mathieu Almaric) and some poisoned radishes.
These stories do not take place, as you might imagine, in Paris, but in the fictional town of (groan) Ennui-sur-Blasé. We are given a tour of the town by Owen Wilson, in a beret and on a bicycle, reminding us how much Anderson’s own dollhouse aesthetic and slapstick comedy owe to the lineage of French directors such as Jacques Tati.
In Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson found a way to mesh history, literature, and his own imaginative fancies. Too often with The French Dispatch, the invention machine is turned on to full blast, but for all the references and in-jokes, the content feels weak, virtual pablum for magazine intellectuals.
Rather than paying tribute to literary journalism or French culture, the film feels like an homage to the whimsy of Wes Anderson. I don’t think he wrote it that way on purpose.
The French Dispatch. Written and directed by Wes Anderson. Starring Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, Saorise Ronan, Adrien Brody, Frances McDormand, Léa Seydoux, Timothée Chalamet, Benicio Del Toro, Elisabeth Moss and Jeffrey Wright. In theatres October 22.