The French Dispatch review: Deconstructed Wes Anderson less than the sum of its parts
The best way to describe The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson’s latest cinematic offering, is as a fractured ode to The New Yorker.
Anderson is a lifetime fan of the high-brow magazine and it’s clear from the outset he intends Dispatch to be a cinematic homage to its most famed authors, editors and idiosyncrasies.
For his 10th feature the standard Anderson troupe return once again: Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton, Ed Norton, Willem Dafoe, Adrien Brody… (the list seems to get longer with every movie as various alumni are invited back).
Murray stars as the editor of the eponymous French Dispatch and is putting together an issue that will, we quickly learn, be its last.
In lieu of an overarching plot, we are presented instead with three magazine-style vignettes by different writers as Murray goes from office to office to check in with his colleagues.
These tales, when combined, would present a plot not dissimilar to Anderson’s last live-action work, The Grand Budapest Hotel, but the whimsical auteur has instead decided to structure the film like a magazine itself (it quite literally ends with an obituary).
This effect means that while individual stars and scenes may shine (Brody and Anderson newcomers Timothee Chalamet and Jeffrey Wright are particular highlights) the film lacks either any forward momentum or personal stakes. Rushmore has Max Fischer, Moonrise Kingdom has a childish love story, Grand Budapest follows Zero’s rise from lobby boy to owner.
There’s none of that in Dispatch. Instead we have an incarcerated artist (Benicio del Toro), his prison guard lover (Lea Seydoux) and an art-promoter (Brody), or a sort-of love triangle amid a student revolution (spear-headed by Chalamet), or a visit to a celebrated ‘police cook’ which goes haywire when a child is abducted.
The 52-year-old’s idiosyncratic filmmaking may be a good match for The New Yorker’s style but his structural decision simply leaves the film collapsing under the weight of its own extreme Anderson-ness with no momentum to throw it forward meaning the overall emotion, such as it is, is ‘twee’ (although, in fairness, some may describe The New Yorker like that at times).
Stop-motion, miniatures and ornate set design, which worked so well for Anderson in the past, here just fall flat. The climax for one particular vignette is entirely cartoon-animated, like a storyboard. It could almost be called lazy.
What’s more Anderson’s decision to utilise his great troupe works against him for perhaps the first time. Saoirse Ronan is wasted in a role is little more than a cameo and — wait is that Jason Schwartzman? — even Anderson’s great muse Murray is a disappointing side character.
That said, Anderson’s oeuvre sets an intimidating standard and there is still a fair bit to like, and at times it feels like there is a better film hiding beneath the set design and structure.
Tilda Swinton probably gets the most laughs as J.K.L. Berensen, one of the Dispatch’s star writers. Christoph Waltz’s cameo as a much-dreaded blind date is a nice touch.
But it’s a shame that a subject Anderson clearly has so much passion for has ended up so passionless.
