The Couch Potato's Guide to News of the World

Film Review of The French Dispatch

By Geoff Carter

As one of the most eclectic filmmakers of his—or any other—generation, Wes Anderson’s work is covered with his beautifully designed fingerprints. His meticulously styled color palettes, the free and interchangeable use of animation within a traditional narrative framework, a playfulness bordering on giddiness (sometimes sinking unexpectedly into the deepest melancholia), and the embedded cultural references are trademarks of his unique style. His stable of ensemble players (including Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Willem Defoe, Tilda Swinton, and many, many others) make watching his movies not only an adventure, but a pleasure, like going to a party where you know everyone.

His newest venture, The French Dispatch, is a film about the last issue of a magazine, The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas, Evening Sun, now based out of Ennui-Sur-Blasé, France. The film has been billed as “a love letter to journalism”, which is not completely accurate. It is also a valentine to a not-so-distant past where great authors wrote for sophisticated and elegant magazines. Loosely based on the halcyon days of the New Yorker magazine, The French Dispatch is an anthology of magazine features—adapted for the big screen—including an obituary, a travelogue, three longer features, and a final stirring epilogue. Anderson, however, expands the narratives to explicitly envelop the authors, thereby exposing the heart of the creative process and—more pertinently—the place of the artist within his or her art.

In the three main features, the writers actively interact with the subjects of their pieces, intertwining their own sensibilities into their stories—which is, as one character keeps insisting—unavoidable. This is also true of Anderson himself. Part of his style—and his charm—is the overt presence of his own sensibilities in his works. His interplay includes insertions of slightly hidden meanings, obscure references, and small riddles into the narrative. In a sense, his style is almost like that of chess master and author Vladimir Nabokov, whose novels present the reader with witty and mostly unsolvable conundrums. It is interesting to note that the second episode is centered around a student rising named The Chess Revolution.

One of the first pieces, “The Cycling Reporter” tracks Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson) as he bikes through Ennui Sur Blasé, conducting a tour of points of interest in the city—not unlike The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town”—although the latter rarely dipped into the seamy side of the city like Sazerac does. When Howitzer (Bill Murray) wonders aloud if Sazerac might write about more pleasant locations in Ennui, Sazerac protests, maintaining that the prostitutes, pimps, nun-beating schoolboys, and sewer rats are “his people”.

Sazerac, pedaling in the foreground through the city landscapes, takes pains to point out where famous landmarks, replaced by shopping malls and the like, used to be. They landmarks belong, like the denizens of the Dispatch, to the past. Sazerac’s tour only highlights the nostalgic sensibility of the film.

The second magazine feature in the anthology is “The Concrete Masterpiece”, about Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio del Toro), an artistic genius serving a life sentence for two vicious murders. While imprisoned, he encounters Simone (Lea Seydoux), a guard he soon realizes is his artistic muse. One of his works attracts the attention of Julian Cadazio (Adrien Brody) a dealer serving a term for embezzment who, realizing the painting’s worth, buys it and through shrewd marketing, makes it the sensation of the art world. Patrons over the globe clamor for more Rosenthaler originals, prompting Cadazio to set up an illicit show at the prison. Rosenthaler’s work causes quite a stir—a riot, in fact—but all ends well when his work is finally preserved for posterity.

Anderson frames the piece as a seminar presented by the feature’s author J.K. L. Berensen—played marvelously by Tilda Swinton as sort of a cross between Hedda Hopper and Joan Rivers, who injects herself into the narrative most forcefully. This segment is loosely based on S.N. Berman’s six-part New Yorker series about art collector Lord Duveen.

Del Toro and Seydoux create a compelling and hilarious chemistry as artist/muse, prisoner/guard, lover/lover, while Brody’s grasping Cadazio is unrelenting in his grasping determination. Anderson’s mix of graphics, black and white footage, tableaux, and stills—including model Simone’s acrobatic poses—adds to the almost bookish quality of the film.

In the second feature, “Revisions to a Manifesto”, reporter Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand) is covering the student uprising—The Chess Revolution. Despite maintaining her steadfast determination to remain an objective reporter, she meets Zeffirelli (Timothee Chalamet), the uprising’s leader at his parent’s house and ends up sleeping with him. And so much for objectivity.

The final feature, “The Private Dining Room of The Police Commissioner” is told by Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), a culinary critic at least partly based on James Baldwin. This story is a wild mash-up of fine dining, police thriller, and finally, as Wright confronts his own loneliness.

Although any description of the film cannot begin to describe all the subtleties, nuances, humor, charming surprises, or the whimsical tone of the film, The French Dispatch conveys a genuine affection for the writers and editors, and in particular, the owner, Arthur Howitzer, Jr., who runs the magazine and manages his writers and staff like a kindly uncle at the family picnic. He is patient and tireless in his efforts to keep the magazine afloat and to keep his authors happy.

Anderson’s movies are funny, beautiful to watch, and captivating, but they are not necessarily easy viewing. They are heavily layered and textured works of imagination full of unexpected twists and turns—not plot twists, but stylistic loop the loops that—like Nabokov—address the viewer on multiple levels.

The Couch Potato—admittedly a Wes Anderson fan—whole-heartedly recommends The French Dispatch. I believe it’s his best work. So far.