The French Dispatch shows why we no longer trust the media.
That obsolete phrase “journalistic integrity” gets mentioned several times in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch. But Anderson’s whimsical ode to journalism contradicts the spirit of screwball comedies about fearless, truth- and sensation-loving newspaper reporters from the 1930s that movie fans fondly remember. The French Dispatch is a Millennial creation, set at the title publication’s headquarters in the preciously named town Ennui sur blasé. That means it celebrates journalism as a class marker, American arrogance served à la Française. Now, when journalistic integrity is most suspect, The French Dispatch seems mistimed — and miscalculated.
Anderson tells three intersecting stories about the professional class — Benecio del Toro as fanatical painter Moses Rosenthaler, Frances McDormand as journo-adventuress Lucinda Krementz, Jeffrey Wright as ethnic bon vivant Roebuck Wright. All are expatriates whose eccentricities elevate the American-owned publication. Vaunted publisher Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray) commands the tone for each narrative: “Try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose,” the eminence tells his worshipful staff. These privileged exploits are meant to be enjoyed the same way credulous audiences trust the famous names at established news networks and, of course, in legacy print media. Anderson is devoted to mythologizing the fourth estate.
The pretend moniker “The French Dispatch” reveals Anderson’s admiration of The New Yorker magazine. Ever since Anderson sought recognition from the late New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael for his second film Rushmore, he aimed toward bourgeois appreciation even though his ideal has recently devolved into an aggressive progressivism platform. It warps his sensibility.
Anderson admirers like myself, who went to bat for his loveliest film, The Darjeeling Limited, when obtuse reviewers were labeling him “twee,” will find The French Dispatch aloof, arcane, and disconcerting. Anderson was the rare filmmaker whose sentiments one responded to personally; he made the best family movies other than Spielberg (his tribal comedy The Royal Tenenbaums borrowed the short-story caprices of New Yorker writer J. D. Salinger). But here, Anderson’s nostalgic upwardly mobile fantasy feels oddly unengaging.
Each tale centers on a foreign correspondent outside Anderson’s usual WASP archetypes, but their dealings with the art world, social unrest, and racial challenges inspire annoying depictions of sexual intrigue and existential risk (death, ignominy, or — worse — obscurity). The preening panning shots, changeable screen shapes, and meticulous decorative fanciness are not necessarily expressive. The freeze-frame crowd shots of freaks staring into the camera like in Fellini are just bad, and an animated chase sequence comes way too late. Despite the characters’ sexual candor, behavioral quirks, and period-specific trendiness, the totality still fetishizes questionable social aspiration. Straining to be droll, Anderson winds up being enervating.
Like Woody Allen’s insufferable Midnight in Paris, Anderson’s ersatz Continental sophistication tests one’s tolerance of cultural superiority: Timothée Chalamet appears as Zeffirelli, a cult rebel in Anderson’s faux French New Wave étude where the black-and-white Cinemascope compositions are off, and the satire of mass-produced Che Guava–style outlaw iconography merely resembles the jejune theatricals of Rushmore. McDormand’s composite Edna St. Vincent Millay figure is similarly facile, as are Del Toro’s tortured-artist intrigues, mixed with Léa Seydoux parodying the nudity in Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, while Adrien Brody lampoons art-savant greed. The worst instance of intersectional folderol is Jeffrey Wright’s subplot exploiting the racially confused legacy of both James Baldwin and Anatole Broyard. Wright’s summary ethnic lament — “Maybe we’ll find what eluded us in the place we call home” — misunderstands the heartache that Baldwin and Broyard wrote about. It is the film’s ultimate failure.
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Strong directorial personalities frequently gather a cast of familiar players, and Anderson has populated his own dollhouse world-building for some time. But lately the Texas-born climber has formed a nexus with the millennium’s imperious globalist culture. Saturnine Del Toro, brittle McDormand, and petulant Chalamet perform their turns on cue, but they’re facetious, signifying obscure, bygone celebrities. Imagine Around the World in 80 Days featuring cameos by semi-famous hipsters. Without achieving spiritual transparency as Lubitsch, Ford, Sturges, and Altman did in their big-screen reflections of humanity, The French Dispatch comes across as secretive and constricted. It’s more exclusive than Marvel’s Avengers — a private party at the Scott Rudin–David Remnick acting company. There’s no galvanizing event like when Anderson peeked inside individual train cars, visited a foreign rural village in India, or re-created the Yellow Submarine. No aha! moment. Instead, he’s relentlessly flippant and unconvincing.
The New Yorker is the wrong institution for Anderson to base his fantasy on, especially since he doesn’t grasp the superficiality of its intellectual brand and political partisanship. (That The New Yorker corroborates the film’s promotional campaign is obnoxious.) The French Dispatch enshrines New Yorker elitism: First, through the idea that its writing is impeccable; then its emotionally confused aristos (the ultra-bourgie types that Alan Rudolph humanized in his Dorothy Parker biopic Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle) speciously represent the common humanity that once made Anderson’s films so poignant. When this pretense is stylized with showboat filmmaking, whatever universal point Anderson tries to make comes off erroneously — snobbish. By the umpteenth time McDormand’s Lucinda snarkily declares, “I should maintain journalistic integrity — if it exists,” the sucking-up to media superiority is undeniable. (The end credits include a roll call of New Yorker alumni.)
Like today’s agenda-driven media, Anderson extols the peculiarities of “experts,” who all come off as smart-asses. In each silly-seeming sequence of Morse code, cooking, painting, hand- and typewriting, and forms of self-defense, we see wry, desperate gestures at communication. That’s what used to make Anderson’s films special. Now, he’s repetitious rather than enlightening. Ironically, it comes at a time when mainstream media’s relation to average experience and common concerns is so distant, so dishonest that it seems tyrannical. The French Dispatch doesn’t repair that breach. Anderson trades filmmaking integrity for the myth of “journalistic integrity.” His particular New Yorker fetish communicates privilege, all in praise of hegemony.
