Anderson’s French Dispatch is precious and pretty, with an emotional punch
Fox Searchlight has finally released Wes Anderson’s very long-awaited new film The French Dispatch, and this sentence pretty much sums it up: “Leutenant Nescaffier is emphatically celebrated among cooks, cops and capitaines, not to mention swindlers, stoolies and snitches, as the great exemplar of police cooking.”
If that sentence – with its very sneaky verb, its obviously overbalanced serial commas, its all too visible use of French terms, and finally, its curious “police cooking”- makes you smile, laugh, giggle, catch your breath, or even tingle, then this is your film. If not, then there’s nothing I, or this review, can do for you.
Let’s start with the cast, which is so swollen with outsized talent that it belongs at the bottom of a Towering Inferno or Airport ‘75 poster: Benicio Del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, Lyna Khoudri, Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, Stephen Park, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Christoph Waltz, Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston, Saoirse Ronan, Elisabeth Moss, and of course Bob Balaban. It’s as if Anderson wanted to get everyone who’d ever appeared in any of his nine films over the last 25 years, and get them all–and I mean all–into one film, and I’m probably missing at least four actors.
What do all these folks do for 1:47 hrs? They inhabit the pages and the world of The French Dispatch of the Liberty Kansas Evening Sun which, as the strained origin story goes, started as a Sunday magazine for a daily newspaper out in the cornfields of Kansas, and somehow (a very Andersonian morphing) turned into an internationally known and revered magazine with a subscription of half a million.
The film’s structure follows that of The New Yorker magazine, which if you’re not aware, opens with small items tied to current events, then features a few pieces of long-form journalism, a short story, reviews, and… that’s enough every week!
Anderson cleverly uses this form to organize the film itself, with a short introductory section in which Owen Wilson introduces the town where the magazine is published, “Ennui-sur-Blasé.” Get it? The film then spiritedly moves through each of its three vignettes, and concludes with a section on putting together the magazine’s final edition.
Though not an anthology, but still very loosely connected, the vignettes give Anderson, who wrote the script (from stories by his longtime collaborators Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinnes, and Jason Schwartzman), a vast canvas to fill with a kaledescopic tableau of characters who speak New Yorker-ish lines to each other in obsessively detailed frames, and who all look as if they’ve stepped from an off, off Broadway stage somewhere between 1946 and 1972.
In “The Concrete Masterpiece” segment, the brilliant but currently incarcerated artist Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro) is tortured by his gorgeously severe muse and guard Simone (Léa Seydoux), his art dealer Julian Cadazio (Adrien Brody), and his uncles (Bob Balaban and Henry Winkler). The vignette’s narration is partially provided by J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton), modeled closely on the real-world Rosamond Bernier, who herself becomes part of the story, which I found a somewhat clumsy attempt to comment on the ever-present distance between the mysteries of great artists, and the critics who marvel at their art, but never can quite figure out why. And yet, here as elsewhere, there are so many Andersonian details to relish: the two-second shot of a very in color and very naked Tilda Swinton in the midst of a black and white vignette, or the short, sweet shot of an extremely modern art museum in the middle of a cornfield, or a prison riot shot as a single, frozen frame.
Turning the page as it were, “Revisions to a Manifesto” sort of follows Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand, modeled partly on longtime New Yorker writer Janet Flanner), who very eagerly follows, and falls for Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet), a smokin’ hot revolutionary with a grenade explosion of hair who leads a youth-inspired and led general grievances strike against “our adult masters.” Matters are considerably muddled when soft-faced but hard-nosed Juliette (Lyna Khoudri) hard-flirts with Zeffirelli through incessant and nitpicky criticisms of his manifesto. The vignette climaxes when police storm the student barricades, after the breakdown of a chess game between the students and the police. Not making a whole lot of sense? Definitely. Sound contrived? You bet! But here Anderson and cinematographer Robert Yeoman revel in shot after shot of Zeffirelli and Juliette looking longingly at each other as the city around them convulses, and Krementz trying to make journalistic sense of it all, while stifling her own heartache by playing relationship coach. The basic idea of the vignette, I think, was to combine proto-New Journalism, a Franco Zeffirelli (get it?) aesthetic, and a soft-focus love of ’60’s European radical youth politics, all tied together by yet more highly controlled Anderson framing. If it sounds like a lot, it IS a lot.
And finally we careen, with barely a breath of pause, into “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner”which is barely able to pull off the creation of a cinematic ratatoullie in which Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), a lonely expatriate polymath writer with a “typographic memory” recounts, on a smoke-filled, and very Dick Cavett-esqe talk show circa 1965, his adventure covering chef Nescaffier (Stephen Park), who serves at the pleasure of Ennui-sur-Blasé’s Commissaire (Mathieu Amalric), The vignette flames with suspense, as a group of thugs led by “The Chauffeur” (Edward Norton) kidnap the Commissaire’s son and crime-solving protégé Gigi (Winsen Ait Hellal) and threaten to kill him unless the local crime syndicate’s recently arrested accountant (Willem Dafoe) is released from jail. I am not making this up. What follows moves so quickly, and includes cameos from so many half-recognized actors, let alone a car chase and shootout treated as a graphic novel, that, watching it, I found myself having to practice deep breathing just to keep up with everything.
Thankfully, the film slows down quite a bit at its ending, which is full of enough spoilers that, suffice to say, just watch it.
What to make of The French Dispatch? Admittedly, as with its characters, and their subjects, I struggle to remain objective. Full disclosure, I’m an unrepentant Wes Anderson Fanboy, even finding things to like about Isle of Dogs, his weakest film, and constantly finding myself thinking of quoting The Royal Tenenbaums or Rushmore as I go through my days, or when daily interactions remind me of certain scenes.
I have similarly deep connections with The New Yorker, issues of which have been on my bedside table, coffee table, dining table, computer bag, suitcase, backpack, and folded in my back pocket since 1995. Anderson references the New Yorker of Wallace Shawn, E.B. White, Mavis Gallant, and Harold Ross. That era’s magazine held a titanic place in American journalism and letters, and, among other things, Anderson’s achievement here is to subtly make us aware of just how powerful it once was, through the brilliance of its writers and editors, and their singular ability to both create and critique the world around them.
My New Yorker is of the era of Tina Brown, Adam Gopnick, Tad Friend, Burkhard Bilger, George Saunders, David Remnick, and, of course, Anthony freakin’ Lane. Today’s New Yorker must compete against cultural, literary, journalistic, and technological forces that its forerunner could scarcely imagine. I commend Anderson for, in ways I don’t quite understand, creating a cinematic through line from my New Yorker to his New Yorker.
Anderson has always been concerned with loss, and the wistful looking-back of damaged but experienced people of today to the slightly more damaged but youthful people of yesterday. The French Dispatch, thankfully, expresses this central theme as well as any of his films (well, maybe not Tenenbaums), and its emotional impact will hinge on whether, and to what extent that theme hits home, because it certainly won’t come from an hour and a half of boutique framing.
Finally, if you’re still on the fence, think about the first time you saw Shakespeare. At first you were befuddled, then you started to get it, then you really got it, then you were hooked. If you’re lucky, that’s what The French Dispatch will do for you.
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The French Dispatch is in Bay Area theaters now, and you’d better see it in a theater now.
