Review: 'The French Dispatch' is an oddball collection of stories that show Wes Anderson at his most whimsical and detail-oriented
One enters “The French Dispatch” hoping Wes Anderson has prepared a sumptuous five-course cinematic meal — and what we find is an hors d’oeuvres tray, each dish prepared beautifully but without a cohesive beginning, middle and end.
The movie — which Anderson directed and wrote with story credit shared with pals Roman Coppola, Hugh Guinness and Jason Schwartzman — is five short stories loosely tied to a central theme: They are all depictions of magazine articles from a publication called The French Dispatch. This magazine is the creation of an eccentric Kansas newspaperman, Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), and somewhat inspired by the literary-minded articles of The New Yorker back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Really, that set-up is an excuse for Anderson to work at his most whimsical, and to mix black-and-white with color and play with aspect ratios for his different tales.
The five stories, mostly in order, are:
• Howitzer’s obituary, which serves as the framing device for the others.
• A travelogue of the fictional Ennui-Sur-Blasé, led by the bicycling correspondent Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson).
• An art critic J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton) describes an imprisoned artist (Benicio Del Toro), a guard (Léa Seydoux) who poses nude for him, and an art gallerist (Adrien Brody) doing time for tax fraud who discovers the painter’s greatness.
• An account by cynical war correspondent Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), who encounters and inspires a headstrong student revolutionary (Timothée Chalamet).
• Another expatriate writer, Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), recalls his greatest story for the magazine: A profile of Nescaffier (Stephen Park), head chef to the city’s police commissioner (Mathieu Amalric), and how his cooking foiled a kidnapping plot.
The bicycle travelogue is fast and flighty, as Sazarec rattles off more observations about Ennui’s seedier side than one can keep track of. Krementz’ story is wistful in its appraisal of how young love and political idealism go hand in hand.
Both Berensen’s story and Wright’s are complex affairs, firstly because they are staged in a way where the storyteller is narrating — Berensen in a lecture hall, Wright on a TV talk show (with Liev Schreiber as the interviewer) — for a satisfactory story-within-a-story effect.
The artist’s story is a tricky dissection of the artist’s process and the art dealer’s ways of turning expression into cash. (The story also features Seydoux, last seen as James Bond’s lady love, fully unclothed and looking divine.)
Wright’s tale, the best of the lot, is practically a full movie in its own, a police procedural complete with a shootout with a bunch of kidnappers (a crew that includes Edward Norton and Saoirse Ronan) and a car chase (shown in animation, but not as richly rendered as “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” or “Isle of Dogs”). Jeffrey Wright’s depiction of the writer, clearly modeled on the social commentator James Baldwin, adds a layer of soulfulness, an outsider digging into the life of another outcast, Nescaffier.
The weakest link in Anderson’s chain is the one that’s supposed to bind the others together: The framing device of the dearly departed editor, Howitzer. We get some flashes of the old newspaperman’s tenacity, and his deft handling of his writers, outwardly irascible but ultimately tender. But Anderson leans too heavily on Murray’s natural bearlike charm, as he dispenses such sage writing advice as “just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.”
Anderson is definitely in his element, creating intricate set pieces that move like the most exquisitely engineered wind-up music boxes, as delicate and as light as a souffle. Anderson has become a magnet for actors wanting to get in on the act; besides those already mentioned, the cast includes Willem Dafoe, Henry Winkler, Bob Balaban, Lois Smith, Christoph Waltz, Tony Revolori, Lyna Khoudri, Elisabeth Moss, Jason Schwartzman, Fisher Stevens, Griffin Dunne and, as the narrator, Anjelica Huston.
No, it doesn’t actually build up to much, other than a showcase for Anderson’s fondness for old-school journalism, oddball outcasts, and perfectly pitched deadpan humor. There’s nothing wrong with the anthology approach — just don’t go into “The French Dispatch” expecting more than some small, well-polished gems.
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‘The French Dispatch’
★★★1/2
Opens Friday, October 29, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for graphic nudity, some sexual references and language. Running time: 108 minutes.