The French Dispatch has an amusing surface but no heart.
The French Dispatch has an amusing surface but no heart.
W es Anderson loves The New Yorker, and he loves France (where he lives), so he set out to make a movie about both. Now showing at the New York Film Festival ahead of an October 22 theatrical release, The French Dispatch is cute but kind of dull. I’d call it a French disappointment.
This high-concept, low-key exercise in sustained drollery is an anthology of three unrelated stories about small-town French life, framed as features in the eponymous magazine, which is published as a supplement to a Kansas newspaper. There is also a shorter amuse-bouche that is meant as a cinematic adaptation of a column about bicycling, and overarching all of this is the story of life at the magazine itself, at the helm of which is a gruff but writer-friendly editor played by Bill Murray. The magazine is published in an adorable, archetypal little French town called Ennui-sur-Blasé, whose name is the kind of almost-joke in which Anderson specializes.
The paternal Murray character and his scuttling minions at the office should be the core of the movie, but Anderson doesn’t realize that, and so he wanders off on extended digressions to tell us what’s in a particular edition of the magazine. We start with Owen Wilson (who seems far too old for the role) as a columnist reflecting on pedaling around the little city and occasionally tumbling into a Métro station as he turns to the camera. Next, another journalist (Tilda Swinton) at the magazine is seen delivering a lecture on her feature about the romance between a genius artist (Benicio del Toro), a prisoner, and one of his guards (Léa Seydoux). After that, the writer/narrator is Frances McDormand, telling a story about a goofball kids’-movie version of the student-led 1968 French riots, this time led by a sensitive intellectual named Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet) and a querulous feminist (Lyna Khoudri) who disagrees with him on strategy.
The last feature, told by a pretentious author (Jeffrey Wright) during an appearance on a garishly designed, retro-1970s talk show hosted by a PBS-style interviewer (Liev Schreiber), is a tale of a fussy police commissioner (Mathieu Amalric) who insists on having his personal chef with him to prepare elaborate meals, even when he’s in hot pursuit of an oddball kidnapper (Edward Norton) who has made off with the cop’s son. The film is so packed with acting talent that three Oscar winners (Christoph Waltz, Adrien Brody, and Anjelica Huston) turn up in minor parts, plus there are fleeting appearances by Henry Winkler, Elisabeth Moss, Willem Dafoe, and Saoirse Ronan.
Every minute of the film is dazzling and/or delightful to behold, and you’d probably be able to guess it’s a Wes Anderson work from any randomly selected 30 seconds. Once again, the twee is maximal: Anderson exults in gorgeous symmetrical compositions, raised-eyebrow camera movements, whimsical throwback sets, adorable little visual asides featuring maps and diagrams, and amusing deadpan acting (except by Chalamet, who seems not to grasp the Anderson style and emotes as though he’s in a completely different kind of movie). Anderson keeps whipping out different color palettes and aspect ratios, even deploying 1930s-style black-and-white for the kidnapping story and animation for a chase scene. (This last detail feels off, and I suspect it was the result of a budget-driven decision.)
But the movie is all surface. Anderson’s longstanding problem is how to convince us there is heart behind his pretty pictures. He pulled it off in Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, and (some of) Isle of Dogs, but the others left me cold. The French Dispatch not only has no feeling, it’s utterly interminable. At 103 minutes, it seemed to smother my entire afternoon. I kept wondering what the point was, and it turns out the big joke is that there isn’t one. Ha ha, I guess.
Someone should have told Anderson that his idea was a nonstarter because a movie is not a magazine and a magazine is not a movie. But you can’t tell an auteur anything, can you? He’s got a mad gleam in his eye, he’s a certified genius, and everyone figures he must know what he’s doing. A title at the end notes that Anderson dedicates the movie to Harold Ross, William Shawn, and other old-timey editors and writers of The New Yorker, but he honored the spirit of the magazine’s early days a little too much. The story about the incarcerated artist, for instance, was inspired by a six-part New Yorker feature, which reminds us that there used to be six-part New Yorker features. One of the things the famous magazine used to be famous for was being dull.
