The French Dispatch
Wes Anderson (2021)
Set in a fictional French town, the outpost of a fictional American magazine, Wes Anderson’s latest is an anthology piece, dramatising supposed articles from the magazine. The sequences framing the narrative are based in the offices of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, which publishes the cultural supplement that gives Anderson’s film its title. The French Dispatch is summarised on IMDb as a ‘love letter to journalists’ and dedicated, ahead of the closing credits, to a long list of contributors, over the decades, to The New Yorker. As expected, plenty of press reviewers, suffering from all-publicity-is-good-publicity syndrome, love the film in return. The fans include both New Yorker film critics (a relief, if not a surprise, that Anthony Lane’s measured praise makes more sense than Richard Brody’s highfalutin hyperbole). Inert from the start, The French Dispatch soon becomes infuriating. With nearly every new scene featuring yet another well-known actor wasting their time, it amounts cumulatively to an obscene squandering of talents, including the writer-director’s own. The project must have required a good deal of research; the result, as usual with Anderson, is a display of fanatically detailed and ingenious design. Yet his treatment of the human components in that design is neither satirical nor admiring – the tone is mildly nostalgic, tamely joshing and tiresomely jocose. The film lacks the emotional energy to be a love letter worthy of the name.
Like The New Yorker, Anderson’s magazine began life in 1925. To ensure that The French Dispatch is thoroughly and safely reminiscent, he doesn’t allow his magazine the longevity of its inspiration. The death of its founding and only editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr (Bill Murray), in 1975, is announced at the start of the film (although that’s not the last we see of Howitzer): his will decrees that, when he ceases to exist, so shall his brainchild. The dramatised articles number four. The first is a relatively short travelogue in which a cycling reporter (Owen Wilson) sets the French provincial scene. The next, enclosed within a lecture by an art historian and critic (Tilda Swinton), tells the story of an artist-murderer (Benicio del Toro) who paints in prison, where his uniformed guard (Léa Seydoux) doubles as his nude model. The third chapter centres on French student politics in 1968, as represented by a soi-disant revolutionary (Timothée Chalamet) and covered by a sharp-tongued foreign correspondent (Frances McDormand). In the last section, a distinguished Black author (Jeffrey Wright), who emigrated to France and wrote about its food, recalls the career of a chef of police cuisine (Stephen Park) and how he solved a kidnapping. Here too the events described are retrospectively contained, in a TV talk show conversation between the writer and an interviewer (Liev Schreiber). In addition to these framing devices and the sequences in Howitzer’s office, there’s an intermittent voiceover narration (by Anjelica Huston), which doesn’t belong to a character and comes from nowhere in particular.
The French town is called Ennui-sur-Blasé. In the gastronomic crime caper, the sleuth chef is Lieutenant Nescaffier. Those names give a fair idea of how self-congratulatory The French Dispatch is, pleased even with the feebleness of its jokes. (It’s apt enough, though perhaps not in the way he intends, that Anderson calls a café in the town ‘Le sans blague’.) An inbuilt advantage of the portmanteau film is that, when it drags, you can rest assured that the next part will be along soon and hope it’ll be better. In The French Dispatch soon is never soon enough and things don’t look up. Perhaps the three elements that make up most of its running time (103 minutes) are conceived as a tribute to The New Yorker’s celebrated feature-length articles (the student politics episode is clearly indebted to Mavis Gallant’s two-part piece on the May 1968 riots). But Anderson does a disservice as much as homage to the magazine of Harold Ross and William Shawn, and to some of those who wrote for them. Anderson’s gay African American in French exile is obviously based on James Baldwin. It’s insulting to the memory of a fine novelist and passionate commentator on race issues to turn him into a food columnist. This seems designed as a killing-two-birds-with-one-stone jape, referencing Baldwin at the same time as teasing The New Yorker’s gourmet tendencies – a quality that ties in, of course, with the magazine’s smart metropolitan flavour. I could make no sense of the film’s premise that a small-town American newspaper would spawn a New Yorker-like offspring in continental Europe (Ennui-sur-Blasé, for the most part, might as well be Paris). Anderson doesn’t even try to get comic mileage out of the mismatch.
The actors’ names in brackets above are the tip of an iceberg of famous names. The cast also features – among many others – Bob Balaban, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Alex Lawther, Elisabeth Moss, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, Jason Schwartzman, Lois Smith and Christoph Waltz. As well as Léa Seydoux, the relatively small contingent of French (or Belgian) actors includes Mathieu Amalric, Damien Bonnard, Cécile De France and Denis Ménochet. Since Anderson has several of his non-French actors pretending to be French, the real thing might seem surplus to requirements. In the event, it doesn’t make much difference because everything French in the film is actually ‘French’ – that is, an educated American’s whimsical view of France and French culture. Not that the Americans in evidence are any less artificial. The characters are sketches at best; those playing them have next to nothing with which to work. The resulting performances aren’t just effortless but weightless. When, rarely, someone suggests a person you’d be interested to know more about – Frances McDormand, Saoirse Ronan (as a chanteuse kidnapper), Liev Schreiber – it’s a momentary shot in the arm to the film but also a little jarring. Giving someone more than one dimension feels like an aberration.
Weightless is also the word for the violence in The French Dispatch. This merits a BBFC warning and it’s true the body count is quite high but the mayhem isn’t offensive. Like everything else, it’s too hollow to matter. There are a couple of animated sequences. You’re almost grateful for the second one: by the time it comes along, the film has become so listless that any kind of dynamism on the screen is welcome. It makes you wonder why Anderson didn’t go the whole hog and make another animated feature; then you remember Isle of Dogs (2018) and think again. In The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), the title location, in its heyday, has the look of a fancy, multi-layered gateau; the produce of a de luxe patisserie plays a significant part in the plot. Even so, the characters just about hold their own against Anderson’s various non-human confections. In The French Dispatch the balance of power has shifted decisively. The people and ideas matter far less than the decoration. It says a lot that a performer as naturally witty as Tilda Swinton is upstaged by the false teeth she wears here. Wes Anderson has become a sort of auteur-patissier, so preoccupied with fancy piping that he’s neglecting to bake a decent cake.
1 November 2021