The French Dispatch

It’s no surprise to find that Wes Anderson returns to his singular style and traits that he is celebrated for with The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel being his highlights, yet his distinctive traits are accelerated to an event greater extent with his latest film, The French Dispatch, except it’s perhaps his most ambitious and inventive film yet. With a lot larger budget, more elaborate set-pieces, and even utilizing different aesthetics, for once Anderson gets outside of his comfort zone in some of the style as he attempts to utilize some more off-balanced frames, high and low angles, black-and-white cinematography, some unique French amination, and there is even a scene where Anderson goes off the tripod and actually stages a scene handheld.

It is quite refreshing to see Anderson trying new things while still staying true to his sensibilities. It’s almost as if Wes Anderson is thumbing his nose at his detractors by utilizing his most uncompromising and passionate vision to date. The French Dispatch is to Wes Anderson as INLAND EMPIRE is to David Lynch, a love letter and rather thank you to his fans who have been embracing his body of work for the last 25 years. It is perhaps his most potent and dizzying film he’s ever made. It’s not the type of film you would recommend to someone who wants to dive into the work of Anderson as their first film of his that they watch, you do have to build up a tolerance for it. For instance, a Lynch fan wouldn’t recommend someone watch to start off watching INLAND EMPIRE as their first Lynch film, you have to graduate and start off with the more accessible ones first.

It’s not to say The French Dispatch isn’t accessible or even demanding, but the film holds a lot of energy, and it can certainly feel overstuffed with so much coming at you all at once. It is no mistake that a clock appears as a metaphor in the film, as Alexandre Desplant’s score amplifies the material just as Jon Brion did with P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love. In other words, The French Dispatch is rapid and moves along very quickly, this is the Wes Anderson film that is equivalent to a whiplash. It isn’t quite as endearing as Anderson’s works. It doesn’t have the family dynamics of The Royal Tenenbaums, or the childlike quality of Moonrise King, or even the human pathos of The Grand Budapest Hotel, his latest film is more of a labor of love where he pushes the limits of how far his style can take him. Wes Anderson is appearing to be in that period of a director’s life just as Brian De Palma was in the 80s and Fellini in the 60s or 70s where they want to push their creativity and the result will be dismissed either as pretentious, unique, or brilliant.

For the record, I commend just how bold Anderson can be with his style. It almost feels like a swan song to his style (I can’t imagine just how much more he can do with this style), but it’s a unique experience and Anderson takes more bold chances than ever before in terms of structure, aesthetics, and even approach. This will be Wes Anderson’s most polarizing film yet, as he is now at the point of his career where he’s trying to make greater chances as he tests uncharted waters in how audiences and critics are going to react. It’s almost as if all the great Wes Anderson traits are here, as in just about every Anderson film, but this time he’s made a film of artistic growth. The film has all the Anderson touches and tasteful exquisiteness, and there’s an element of elegiac maturity in its themes about a fading world of a printed press that actually valued writers as well as the written pros. The film is an ode and farewell to journalism and magazines they were co-opted by mega-corporations and eventually reduced to internet articles and online videos.

Perhaps his most self-aware and even most artificial live action film since the polarizing and flawed The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, but he allows the audience to actually connect with it more on an emotional level. While not as emotionally resonant as his greatest efforts like The Royal Tenenbaums, The Grand Budapest, Rushmore, or even Fantastic Mr. Fox—The French Dispatch keeps the audience in an imbalance–it holds our attention by celebrating its artifice and by also playing tribute to authors, writers, and the power of storytelling. While utilizing his deadpan hilarity into full impact here, the audience I screened The French Dispatch with laughed, applauded, and absorbed themselves in some of the more poignant moments that just demonstrated how Wes Anderson still has the talent to fill a human connection to his work while still honing in his artifice.

To that impact, The French Dispatch is an absorbing, effectively somber film–but outside really diehard Wes Anderson fans I do not think it will be film that will unite critics, moviegoers or even all moderate Wes Anderson fans, but it will more than likely  divide audiences and join the ranks of other auteur driven films like Fellini’s Amarcord, De Palma’s Body Double, David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE, Lars von Trier’s The House that Jack Built, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice,  Scorsese’s After Hours, Sergio Leone’s Duck, You Sucker, Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, and Nicholas Refn’s The Neon Demon that will be more savored and appreciated as time passes on. This is Wes Anderson’s fine wine film that could very well be ahead of its time. Anderson is a very sophisticated, skillful director –which many dismiss as a one-trick pony–but if they look closer, they will see a more complex yarn that is meticulously staged on all levels. I’m enthralled to see Anderson can take his direction to new and exciting levels, while still staying true to his vision.

To that record, there has always been a yearning for the past in all of Wes Anderson’s films–even his more modern ones his characters are dressed as if they exist in a Jacques Tati or François Truffaut French film. Anderson’s characters always live in a world of the past. In The French Dispatch, he amplifies these passions even more. It’s an anthology piece, very much like Kelly Reichard’s Certain Women, or the Coen’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which was a very solid film that had three great shorts as the last two were draining and exhausting. In The French Dispatch there are only three short stories (including a very small monologue and epilogue) that chronicles a group of American writers who resided in a fictional French named Ennui-sur-Blasé. All three shorts are all very satisfying in their own different ways.

Visually arresting and intricate in plot and theme–The French Dispatch is a rarity and one that will require repeat viewings for a deeper analysis as so much is going on in many levels. On the surface, the film feels like you are just getting another Moonrise Kingdom or Grand Budapest Hotel. Yes, you get the symmetry, the balanced frames, rich décor, and exquisite cinematography by frequent Director of Photography Robert Yeamon. Anderson returns with his frequent A-List of actors that he’s used in the past before with Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Jason Swartzman, Adrian Brody, Saorise Ronan, Frances McDormand, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, and Willem Dafoe. There are also some new faces he casts for the first time with Benecio Del Toro, Jeffrey Wright, and Timotee Chamalat.  Also, what comes with this is melancholy–which the lonely souls try to overcome their emotional suffering through records and leather shoes All of this should feel familiar and self-parody by now. Yet, Wes Anderson has a way of winning you over by drawing a human connection that makes his vision once again feel deeply personal.

The French Dispatch is also Anderson’s most romanticized film to date. He bemoans an era where writers were valued, paid well, weren’t reduced to limitations, had more creative freedom, and were valued by their employees before the era of mega-corporations bought out magazines and the press. With a setting in the 1960s, with aesthetics that resemble the look of Jacques Tati Monsieur films. The film opens in the prologue with a narrator (Angelia Huston) celebrating the life of fictional editor Artur Howitz Jr. (Bill Murray), who is a very stern and strict person who values journalism, storytelling, and writing. He runs a newspaper out of an office building that was originally started as a small outlet newspaper in Liberty, Kansas. The film transitions over to the papers travel writer Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson) who guides the audience into the history of Ennui-sur-Blasé’ town history that consists of rat tunnels, gentrification, and a river that always has the same yearly body count no matter how much more of the population grows each year. The first chapter of the story before the prologue that introduces The French Dispatch is titled The Concrete Masterpiece – by J.K.L. Berensen, in which each chapter serves as the The French Dispatch’s magazine articles.

Tilda Swinton plays JKL Berenstein (Tilda Swinton) who narrates to a crowd about Moses Rosenthaler,  renowned painter Benicio del Toro as Moses , an incarcerated abstract painter whose muse and lover Simone (Léa Seydoux) just also happens to be his prison guard. Moses is in prison for double homicide after killing two men in self-defense once he noticed they were bullying an elderly man in a bar. Simon also serves as his promoter who Julian Cadadazio (Adrian Brody) is in awe of Moses’s artwork and wants to represent him in the art collecting world. He also wants to use his status and wealth to get Moses out of jail. This segment is very involved and holds some of the most satire out of the three while also delivering some strong characterizations with the Moses character. The chemistry between Moses and Simone (Seydoux) is more convincing than the chemistry between Craig and Seydoux in the last few Bond films, perhaps because Seydoux is more comfortable in the art-house realm other than big-studio blockbusters.

The second story titled Revisions to a Manifesto – by Lucinda Krementz is perhaps the most comical and whimsical. It takes place during the 1968 student protests in Paris, which certainly feels like a more fanciful version of Bernando Bertulluci’s The Dreamers This segment of the story features Timothée  Chalamet as Zeffirelli, an idealist and revolutionary who wants to start his own manifesto, who also is attracted to Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), an editor and writer for The French Dispatch who helps edit and guide him in his writing of the manifesto who feels her objectify is compromised once  she guides Lucinda in what he should write in the Manifesto. There is also a very cleverly done ambiguous touch that plays on just how far their relationship goes as Zleffirelli likes to think he is romantically involved with Lucinda, as Lucinda feels like he’s mistaken their planktonic friendship for something deeper. Zeffirelli is also writing the manifesto in hopes it can touch the heart and mind of Juliette (Lyna Khoudri), a student revolutionary who is every bit as passionate about the revolution as Zeffirelli is.

The third and final story titled The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner-by Roebuck Wright, features a writer and sonorous voiced author named  Roebruck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), who recounts his story exactly how he wrote i6 without reading it from The French Dispatch magazine as he recollects the story to a talk show host (Liev Schreiber). He remembers the time he had a private dinner with the Police Commissaire of Ennui (Mathieu Amalric) in which the dinner gets disrupted once Gigi, the Commissaire’s son is kidnapped by a disguised Chauffer (Edward Norton) and held ransom by his syndicate.  The Commissaire’s police Lt. Nescaffier (Stephen Park) is put in charge to negotiate with the kidnappers’ demands and provide them and Gigi with food. This vignette of the film holds the most resonance as it offers the most emotional payoffs. Both Park and Jeffrey Wright are terrific in their roles and they both carry out tender moments that reach some deep sadness and character depth.

Collaborating again with Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman in the creative process, Anderson delivers his film, which the first-rate set design by Oscar-winning production designer Adam Stockhausen and another frequent Anderson collaborator, once again gives the film a deliberately polished and deceptively artificial look. With Yeoman’s masterful cinematography and Andrew Weisblum’s skillful editing merged with Alexander Desplat’s luminous score brings great energy and momentum to the storytelling.

The film earns its touches and still feels fresh with Anderson’s idiosyncratic details, while still accentuating its deadpan hilarity. Measured with a more bold and elegiac approach by Anderson this time around, as he plays wonderful tribute to the writers and their intricate bonds with Arthur Howitzer Jr. and other acquaintances of their past memories. Anderson once again takes the audience through a very intimate and mournful journey. Highly inventive, The French Dispatch certainly comes with what you would expect from Wes Anderson, but it feels every bit as remarkable as The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel did with his style. I admit to being skeptical of “The French Dispatch” just being more of the same, but Anderson pulls it off once again with a more confident vision that still feels alive with wit and spirit.