Mark Reviews Movies: THE FRENCH DISPATCH

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 28, 2021

The editor-in-chief of the magazine is dead, and with him dies the magazine itself. That's the basic setup of writer/director Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch, which is less interested in a plot than it is with a series of stories, less interested in stories than it is with an underlying mood of distant mourning, and less interested in mood than it is with a string of meticulously crafted images.

If that description suggests an equation filled with subtraction, that's appropriate in communicating the end result of Anderson's latest. The filmmaker keeps stripping away much here, beginning with its narrative through line and ending with much sense of some emotional or thematic foundation to his series of stories.

The framing device involves a Sunday pull-out magazine in the pages of a Kansas-based newspaper. Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), the zine's chief, has died of a heart attack. His will stipulates that the eponymous publication will cease, following a farewell issue consisting of his obituary and four articles from the magazine's decades-long history.

It's not much of a plot, but as Anderson has proven again and again, his work doesn't need or particularly demand much plot for his brand of image-based, character-focused, and whimsically sorrowful storytelling to work. Most of those trademarks are overshadowed this time.

Divided cleanly into five parts, with a semi-repeating epilogue, by way of title cards, the movie provides us that obituary and those four articles, each of them narrated by the author and re-created in stagey scenes of tableau, populated by an extensive—and, hence, often underutilized—cast and crafted using multiple formats (crisp black-and-white and vibrant colors from cinematographer Robert Yeoman), aspect ratios, and media (still drawings and, for one chase sequence, an animated comic strip). It's an impressive technical accomplishment, to be sure, and an aesthetic treat in momentary, if frequent, flashes. It's also consistently frustrating in the way Anderson allows his style to completely overshadow any sense of humor, story, and meaning this anthology may or could possess.

After briefly learning about Arthur and the magazine's history (Anjelica Huston provides the first bit of narration), our first article, written and narrated by travel writer Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), offers a tour of the magazine's base of operations. In the fictional city of Ennui-sur-Blasé (a name that gives us a sense of both the movie's mood and Anderson's approach to the material), we watch people going about their everyday lives in shots, sets, and visual gags that recall the work of Jacques Tati, either directly or by general homage. It's a fine, quirky start that also establishes the narrative's basic pattern—a brief introduction, the story, Arthur and the author discussing the editing of the piece.

The second tale is the movie's most effective, most refined, and funniest. It follows the strange case of artist Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro), an inmate in a local criminal asylum (His attorney argues he "accidentally" decapitated two bartenders), and art dealer Julian Cadazio (Adrien Brody), who discovers Moses' modernist work while serving time for tax evasion. Prison guard Simone (Léa Seydoux) is the artist's subject and muse (quite one, at that), and writer J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton) relates the odd tale in a lecture hall, offering one accidental and one intentional aside that she might have had a more intimate relationship with her own subject.

The third story involves a college-student revolution that took place in Ennui, led by Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet)—with the amusingly underwhelming slogan, "The children are grumpy"—and shrewdly or directly guided by on-scene reporter Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), who writes most of the revolutionary's manifesto for him. This segment is mostly a dud of unformed ideas, both comedic (Lucinda's involvement in the story and the apparent pointlessness of the revolt) and thematic (the more existential pointlessness of the revolt, in a sadder key).

The fourth revolves around food columnist Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), who's supposed to profile an esteemed chef (played by Stephen Park) within the local police force. Instead, he ends up distracted by the kidnapping of the son of the police Commissaire (Mathieu Amalric) by a collection of local gangsters. This tale features some dynamic comedy and the most straightforward plot, but the highlight is Wright, offering the best and most subtly poignant performance among a sometimes distractingly expansive cast (This one alone has glorified cameos from Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, and Willem Dafoe).

Indeed, much of the movie—from the large cast to the intricate details, precise framing, and chameleonic palette of the imagery—feels like a distraction from how thin each of these stories (as well as the wider one) and characters, how rudimentary the movie's themes, and how shallow its emotional core actually are. The French Dispatch presents itself as an ode to and a mourning for a certain era and type of journalism. It comes across, though, mostly as Anderson's ode to his own aesthetic sense, and the mourning is for the unfulfilled potential here.

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