In Wes Anderson’s new film, The French Dispatch, an ageing newspaper editor dies from a heart attack sending the staff of his paper, succinctly named The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kanas Evening Sun, into a mournful flurry. They pull together one final issue, say adieu to their beloved leader, and no doubt start to question the precarity of their financial futures (they are journalists after all).
Bill Murray, a long-time interloper of Anderson fare, is the ageing newspaper editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. whose likeness to real-life newspaper editor Harold Ross has not gone unacknowledged. Neither has the likeness of Howitzer’s Dispatch to Ross’ New Yorker magazine – heard of it?
In other words, The French Dispatch is Anderson’s homage to the New Yorker of old, with end-credits that read like a Who’s Who of the magazine’s star reporters. But how to make a movie into a magazine?
There, as Hamlet would say, is the rub. Anderson, and his writing team, opt for an anthology of stories organised in the film as articles for the Dispatch’s final issue. Throughout the film, we read “Local Color”, “Arts and Artists”, “Poetry Section”, “Taste and Smells”, all of which whimsically include page numbers (as if people need those anymore).
Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson) gives us a cycling tour of the magazine’s fictional hometown, Ennui-sur-Blasé. A toothy Tilda Swinton recounts the story behind modern art’s latest darling: a mentally disturbed convict played by Benicio del Toro.
Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand) reports from the frontlines of Ennui’s student protests. And Roebuck Wright, an exiled American writer played by Jeffrey Wright, recalls a memorable evening as the dinner guest of the Ennui Police Commissaire, Matthieu Amalric (“Dominic Greene” to the Bond fans out there).
But this being a Wes Anderson film, something of an event every Hollywood star wants a slice of, we are also treated to a glut of glitzy cameos. Willem Defoe is staring at us from the murky shadows of a prison cell and Saoirse Ronan disguised as the demimonde.
Anthology films, however, can be a mixed bag, and The French Dispatch is no exception. In his opening report, Owen Wilson speeds by almost too quickly. In contrast, Tilda Swinton, intoning the merits of del Toro’s tortured artist from some future-set conference lectern, can’t speed by fast enough.
Roebuck Wright’s final report is the best of the bunch, a highly stylised take on the already highly stylised French gangster movie circa Jean-Pierre Melville, et al. It’s certainly quite the feat – not least because it’s the only story with any heart.
Other recent anthology films like the Coen Brother’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs remain conservative in their ontological play – there is a phantom hand turning the page of an old storybook, closing one tale to begin another. Here, Anderson has the dramatic frame broken so much you forget there ever was one; at one point, the characters become cartoons. This isn’t to say The French Dispatch isn’t fun, but perhaps to say that’s all it is.
After a few hours of highly orchestrated scene work and perfectly distressed set design, the bells and whistles of the Anderson style become slightly numbing.
So little emotion is conveyed on the big screen, there’s nothing to grab hold of. Instead, things just . . . happen. Cub scouts bust up a beret’d Sazerac; a brawl breaks out in a maximum-security prison; a ragtag group of criminals kidnap the Police Commissaire’s son. Bullets and hijinks ensue. Through all this, The French Dispatch remains a tableaux vivant. Ironic, when so much seems to be moving.
In this new outing, Anderson has leaned into his style with such religious fervour it’s almost like you’re watching a film by Roy Andersson, the veteran Swedish filmmaker of A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence and You, The Living. Both filmmakers have a dioramic eye for scene work. Maybe it has something to do with their names?
Anderson (one “s”) is like the spruced up, big-budget American cousin of the wildly under-watched Andersson (double “s”). But such is Wes’s jeu d’esprit he forgets something Roy doesn’t; The French Dispatch doesn’t seem sure how to become more than its wit and charm – though maybe it doesn’t want to be.
Those who enjoy the whims of one of cinema’s most parodied stylists will find much to marvel over, while others might simply be bored. Or, in the case of one pensioner behind me, snooze ‘til the end credits. Then again, the seats were very comfortable.
The French Dispatch is in cinemas now.