The French Dispatch: Another Hilarious Visual Stunner From Wes Anderson
7 years after he scored high marks with The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson makes his triumphant return to live-action with his resplendent 10th feature, The French Dispatch. Featuring another sprawling ensemble cast, Anderson crafts a gleefully piquant anthology, replete with his signature swagger and flair, that pays loving homage to The New Yorker, its writers and editors, and it may just be the auteur’s best film to date.
A love letter to journalists set in an outpost of an American newspaper in a fictional twentieth century French city that brings to life a collection of stories published in "The French Dispatch Magazine."
Over his 25-year (and counting!) career Wes Anderson has cultivated a highly specific, well-established style that you’re either into or you’re not. By this point, you pretty much know what you’re going to get before you even see it (more or less). You can bet your bottom dollar that there’ll be planimetric staging, symmetrical framing and precise camera moves, beautifully crafted, lavishly decorated tactile sets, wonderful tableaus and flat lays, colorfully sophisticated characters, fashionable costumes, and witty humor. The acute style and meticulous craftsmanship is part of what keeps us all coming back, but there’s also appeal in seeing how Anderson adds new formal elements and players into his ever-growing repertoire.
With The French Dispatch, we get all the usual Anderson hallmarks, along with some welcome new additions, in the shape of an anthology. We’re introduced to the titular French dispatch (of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun) through the death of its founder and chief editor, Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray). In the film’s prologue, it’s explained that the death of Howitzer means the end of the magazine. The anthology that unfolds is essentially the assemblage of the publication’s final issue, which includes an introduction to the city and three stories (about an imprisoned artist, a student revolution, and a kidnapping), closed out with an epilogue. We’re presented with a new batch of quirky characters, comprised of many frequent Anderson collaborators and some new faces (namely Benicio Del Toro, Timothée Chalamet, Jeffery Wright, and Elizabeth Moss), and taken for an enchanting ride through the the kind of singularly grandiose world that only Wes Anderson could create. All of it, very fitting of an editor’s burial.
The French Dispatch is just as immaculately conceived and sprawling in scope as The Grand Budapest Hotel, but it also feels like Anderson’s largest and most intricately crafted effort to date. Instead of cobbling together several disparate locations to create a cohesive whole, Anderson and his phenomenal team transform the actual city of Angoulême into the fictional city of Ennui-sur-Blasé, which roughly translates to "Boredom-on-Apathy” — a humorously fitting name that sums up the feelings of those who don’t quite connect to Anderson’s richly detailed anthology (or his work as a whole). His vision is as clear-eyed as ever and rendered with unbelievably steady hands. The level of detail on display here is astounding and encroaching on Kubrickian with regard to its meticulousness. It’s an absolute visual feast (but it may feel like an overwhelming assault to some), with gorgeousness and gorgeousity in every frame, and it’s also one of the year’s downright funniest films to boot.
Anderson’s style is perfectly suited for the anthology format, and he gleefully takes advantage of all the liberties it affords. Each new section allows him to play around with various formal techniques. Here he mixes black & white and color cinematography, live-action with animation, and academy (1.37:1) and anamorphic ratios (2.39:1). On the whole, each of The French Dispatch’s main stories are uniformly solid and peppered with excellent performances (Benicio Del Toro, Adrien Brody, Léa Seydoux, and Jeffery Wright were our standouts), but as is the case with any anthology, certain stories will play more favorable than others, depending on the viewer. Fortunately, the pacing and consistency issues you find in many anthologies aren’t present here. Everything is smooth, evenly keeled, and gracefully laced together.
Overall, The French Dispatch offers fans a wider assortment of Anderson’s patented cinematic delights, thanks in part to its anthology framework. As much as it repackages the usual hallmarks, it also weaves new elements into the familiar tapestry, and once again showcases Anderson’s knack for building vividly intricate worlds that feel real despite their fanciful presentation. In short, it’s really everything one could want out of a Wes Anderson film. It’s expertly sculpted, deeply comical, effortlessly charming, and endlessly playful. Folks are gonna find reasons to tear this one down, but we’re not one to hate on something this carefully crafted or gleefully enjoyable. For our money, it ranks amongst the best of Anderson’s work and may just be his finest film to date. It’s a shoo-in for the year’s best comedy, and we can’t wait to see it again.
Recommendation: If you’re a fan of Wes Anderson, you absolutely need to check this one out! We think it’s one of the year’s best films, and you’ll likely find it on our end-of-year list.
Rating: 5 issues outta 5.
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