Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch is a Salute to Imperfection in a Perfectionist's Career
Wes Anderson’s deliberate and atypical style seems to set something off in certain people. For all the talk of preciousness and pretense, points not entirely unfounded, I’ve always welcomed his films primarily because they never look like hyper-realistic gray mud or involve extended scenes of people fighting in concrete warehouses. While I count myself a fan, the films of his that are considered most hallowed by public opinion are typically the ones I could live without. Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom; when he’s telling a story that hinges on quirky love, he rarely rouses my feelings above nonplussed.
Thankfully The French Dispatch (2021) largely side steps emotional coercion and instead, in its way, finds Wes Anderson at his most passionate. This comes at the cost of mixed reviews and a split in his fanbase that I suspect is due mostly to the film’s sense of humor. It’s a sort of low steaks irreverence that never aims to be laugh-out-loud funny, and nothing turns people off like a joke they expect to go one way and then lands another. The jokes in this film exist on a sort of intellectually tickling plane that’s amusing when you think about it after the fact but not exactly hilarious to behold. You know, just like a New Yorker cartoon.
Ah, now here’s where half the audience already mentally shuts down.
But hang in there! What could so easily have been a nightmare in the wrong hands, instead is a perfectly packaged Wes Anderson-styled treat. It’s a love letter not as much to journalism as it is to imperfection, tangents and passion in a profession that demands rigid boundaries and superhuman impartial observation. While none of these themes are new to the Wes Anderson oeuvre, The French Dispatch’s focus on workaholism turns out to be the perfect vehicle to justify its deliberate visual style and deliver true emotional sincerity.
The French Dispatch is told as a series of vignettes that echo the structure of its titular magazine; that bastion of culture which sprung from the mind of a Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun editor while on a fateful vacation to city of Ennui-sur-Blasé, France. We open on the obituary of said editor in chief, Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), which helps to introduce us to the magazine staff. We continue to a short travel piece by Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson) that takes in the scope and ambiance of Ennui’s grittiest side streets by bike. Which leads us to “The Concrete Masterpiece” by J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton), a profile on the artist-cum-convincted felon Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio del Toro), his prison guard muse Simone (Léa Seydoux), and his discovery by famous art dealer and fellow convicted felon Julien Cadazio (Adrien Brody). It’s a rollicking piece about love and chance, that ends with a prison-bound art opening quickly dissolving into a full scale prison riot, as shown in a series of tableaus.
Pushing ahead, we’re dropped into a story of French student revolutionaries in “Revisions to a Manifesto” by Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand). Lucinda, a seasoned journalist with a pessimistic outlook on love and a weakness for boundaries, profiles and then becomes involved with young revolutionary Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet) after he approaches her for feedback on his bluntly written political manifesto. Last but not least, we end on a wild story of kidnapping, police shootouts and a heroic chef by food writer Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) called “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner.” Where we then find ourselves right back to the original obituary to close out the issue.
If you’ve come looking for character exploration and immersive storytelling, you might feel let down by the film’s rather arms-length narrative, lightning fast cameos and sardonic in-joke humor. There is a take it or leave it factor at play here; one part that made me laugh out loud was a portrayal of a dramatic suicide scene in a fake stage play that a completely tangential character is said to have written, as explained in the off-lead article of the imaginary French Dispatch newsmagazine of the state of Kansas. That’s the sort of level of ‘joke’ you’ll get across the board, largely riffing on cultural institutions and personalities when it’s not indulging in silly wordplay. Lois Smith’s turn as an intimidatingly wealthy American art collector with a strong Southern twang and blunt vocabulary, or Wally Wolodarsky as a beloved lifelong magazine employee that’s never actually written an article; Anderson’s mixes specific cultural influences with archetypes, indulging in his own interests while still trying to not fully alienate his audience.
The rest of the humor is far more physical but still follows this same mix of highbrow and lowbrow sensibilities. Leaning into the setting, The French Dispatch follows in the footsteps of French cinematic heroes Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis with its gorgeous art direction, impeccably designed dollhouse sets, whip fast dolly-shot visual gags and even some full-on pratfalls. For once his hyper-stylized visuals are completely justified – Anderson parallels the physical structure of this newsmagazine through his filmmaking, such as shooting the narrated articles in black and white, like text on paper. He punctuates these sequences with vivid ‘color photograph’ scenes of note and sidebar recollections not necessarily found on the page. He even includes an entire animated cartoon sequence to represent an after-the-fact graphic novel adaptation of what has clearly since become a notorious article.
All of this to say The French Dispatch is Wes Anderson playing to his technical strengths while indulging in a sort of devil-may-care abandon he’s hitherto only flirted with. There’s little to no super serious moments or even full character arcs; the magazine’s quixotic desire to bring high culture to a middle American audience parallels Anderson at his most self-deprecating. Yet the true emotion in this film, like its sense of humor, comes from thinking about the concept outside of the context it’s presented in. The sweetness of Howitzer’s desire to let his star writers be true to themselves in the pursuit of dynamic storytelling and his fierce defense of their convoluted writing processes. The beauty of an unrestrained creative space that allows if not encourages a sort of creative gestalt therapy. The nostalgia for this age of celebrity journalism, that mix of intellectual curiosity with a sort of introverted showmanship that thrives in one-on-one interaction.
To the chagrin of some viewers, the heart of this film exists behind the stories it tells. It’s the push and pull between the larger-than-life but still essentially private personalities of these authors who struggle between journalistic integrity, the pursuit of an emotional truth and the messy boundaries of ego; the hint of more salacious or depressing details swept under the rug in order to due right by your subject. The final vignette with Jeffrey Wright’s James Baldwin amalgamation portrays this dynamic the clearest in a scene where Bill Murray rescues a piece of writing from the trash. Here I’m caught between wanting to recount it word for word and also not wanting to spoil what amounts to the best scene in the entire film – but it involves a private conversation between Wright and Lieutenant Nescaffier (more har-har French wordplay, played by the great Stephen Park) that Wright had deemed too personally revealing to include in his otherwise rollicking tale of action and suspense.
It’s this jolt of reality that lights up all of the cracks in the previous stories. From Sazerac’s need to focus on the downtrodden in order to feel he’s being true to life, to Berensen declining to include details of her own deeply personal relationship with the artist she is profiling in precise academic detail, or Krementz’s avoidance of her own personal life in order to capture a youthful energy she can only face professionally. The film wholeheartedly embraces these contradictions as the heart of this writers approach to journalism (as opposed to the journalists approach to writing). It’s as much an indulgence in, as it is a loving portrayal of, the type of airy intellectualism that crumbles rather quickly when you pull back the curtain only to find the trembling author barely concealing their own vulnerabilities. It’s a portrait of a messy time and a messy medium that’s since been reworked and perfected and streamlined – which is either romantic or horrible, depending on which angle you look at it.
All of this to say, I fully get why people are pissed. It’s a specific niche of a specific time and a specific magazine and unless you recognize what he’s painting here I’m sure the whole thing just seems completely random. There’s also a degree of pomposity that comes with Wes Anderson embracing his own role as the nonfiction filmmaking equivalent of a midcentury journalist – especially when the importance of not cutting the heart for the action is the overarching theme at play here. But arguably, he earns it in The French Dispatch more than ever. And if nothing else, if you’re really coming in cold and leaving even colder, perhaps do yourself a favor and Google some of those people he thanked at the end. It might surprise you.
