If you want to be cast in a Wes Anderson movie, it helps to have a natural frown.
Think of these faces: Bill Murray, Anjelica Huston, Adrien Brody, Frances McDormand, Bruce Willis, Ralph Fiennes. None of them are known, first and foremost, for their smiles.
For The French Dispatch, Anderson brings back Murray, Brody, and McDormand, while adding these morose mugs to the mix: Benicio Del Toro, Timothee Chalamet, Jeffrey Wright, Lea Seydoux. This is another sad-sack Anderson movie, with perhaps the saddest collection of actors we’ve seen.
And yet, this being Anderson, The French Dispatch is also absolutely delightful. An ode to both the exuberance and loneliness that accompanies the creative life (the writing life, in particular), the film is centered around the title magazine—a New Yorker-style American periodical published from a fictional, mid-century French city. In the style of an anthology movie, we witness three of the magazine’s stories as they are reported, written, and published, all under the auspices of founding editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Murray).
And so there are layers—far too many for the Anderson skeptic, I’m sure. (There are points that even tried my patience, and I’m an Anderson devotee.) Each installment is given a framing device of some sort, then the narrative of the story itself, which is complicated by competing points of view and “edited,” in the end, by Howitzer Jr. Within the short-film structure, all of this moves exceedingly quickly, making an initial viewing experience leaving you breathless.
As might be expected, The French Dispatch is aesthetically layered, as well. After an early sequence that steals directly from Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (an exterior establishing shot of the dilapidated Dispatch building, through which a waiter passes by various windows and stairways), much of the movie fills the screen with props, sets, and busy backdrops. A prologue involving Owen Wilson on a bicycle, for instance, has him cycling in place while the production design changes behind him. It’s almost as if Anderson has purposefully limited himself to the constraints of a single frame, like a stage (the movie often employs a boxy aspect ratio). Indeed, The French Dispatch resembles one of his stop-motion efforts—Fantastic Mr. Fox, Isle of Dogs—more than his live-action films, only with actors instead of puppets. (There’s also an amusing digression into traditional animation with a sequence done in the style of the Belgian comic strip “The Adventures of Tintin.”)
One particularly effective recurring visual motif involves transitioning from black-and-white to color. (Longtime Anderson collaborator Robert D. Yeoman serves as cinematographer.) This is especially potent in the first story, featuring Del Toro’s incarcerated painter and Seydoux as his muse and prison guard. While Del Toro is looking up at the dark, mottled ceiling, inspiration strikes, and the screen bursts into pastels. In the second story—in which McDormand’s Lucinda Krementz gets too close to her subject, Chalamet’s aloof leader of a student revolt—there is a moment when Chalamet and Lyna Khoudri share a color-bursting bike ride. Later, we get a breathtaking jump from dinginess to the brilliant blue of Saoirsie Ronan’s eyes. Each time color intrudes, you get that unexpected jolt—an aesthetic epiphany—that Anderson’s films so often offer. It’s the moment our frowns turn into smiles.
Even so, there’s a fussiness to the intricacies of The French Dispatch that kept me somewhat at a distance. As in The Grand Budapest Hotel, the layer-cake structure at times subsumes the characters. If there’s one performance that cracks through the coatings and registers as a truly tangible person, it’s Wright’s turn as Roebuck Wright (clearly modeled after James Baldwin, who had his own expatriate years in France and wrote for The New Yorker). Wright also has narrative hoops to jump through—he’s introduced as an older man being interviewed on television, where he recounts the events of the story that appeared in the magazine in his younger years—but he turns that to his advantage, offering a portrait of a man remembering the lessons he learned in his early experiences as a writer, then burrowing into the emerging artist of the character’s youth. At one point Wright delivers a soliloquy about a “solitary feast” that’s among the most poignant moments an Anderson film has offered, a beautiful, melancholy summation of the experience of being a scribe whose closest companion are their words.
When Roebuck Wright or Lucinda Krementz frown, then, it’s partly in sadness, but also as an expression of creative concentration. In their writing, there is difficulty, but also meaning, a purpose. The resulting stories themselves are almost beside the point. Something similar seems to be going on with The French Dispatch. The movie isn’t really about what it’s about. More than any of his other films, The French Dispatch seems to be about the experience of making it.
(10/20/2021)
