The French Dispatch

 

The French Dispatch (2021)

Dir. Wes Anderson

Written by Wes Anderson, story by Anderson, Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinness, Jason Schwartzman

Starring everybody

 

You know, it took me a long time to get on the Anderson train. Back in 2012 (good lord, ten years ago!), when I reviewed MOONRISE KINGDOM, I summarized my feelings thusly:

"...despite his obviously enormous talent for cinematic language (everything from camera framing to narrative construction to music), he often cripples the experience with his obsessive desire to shoehorn in his particular fetishes for children’s plays, bathrobes, tents, pajamas, board games, irritating people, etc. Not that I fault the guy for having a recognizable --even iconic-- style; my problem is that once you get past the quirky trappings and arch performances, you often find that there’s not really much else there. Anderson is so busy swaddling his characters in quirks and quips that he forgets to fill in the inside. Consequently, watching his films can be a somewhat hollow experience."

At that time, THE LIFE AQUATIC was the only one of his films I really loved, and since that's the one film that most of Anderson's fans seem to really hate, I just figured I wasn't on this guy's wavelength. There’s something slightly oppressive in his early movies, burdened as they are by lethargic pseudointellectual ennui. THE LIFE AQUATIC leans into that somewhat with a Noah-Baumbach-assisted screenplay that flirts with outright miserabilism --which to my mind makes for a more potent contrast with the whimsical visuals-- but otherwise, I find his early run of films uncomfortably airless and gloomy, and without the psychological depth which would make that feeling productive.* Which is not to say bad, per se, just not really my jam. I could respect the specificity of Anderson’s auteurial vision, but it seemed clear that his work just wasn't for me. And especially after his tendency towards suffocatingly ornate sad boi manchild moping reached its zenith with the infuriatingly dégagé DARJEELING LIMITED and gratingly bijou FANTASIC MR. FOX,** I was ready to cut my losses and move on.

But things change, and to my increasing surprise I've liked and eventually loved pretty much everything he's done since. And it's not because he backed off on the style; if anything he doubled down. But crucially, after the insufferable DARJEELING, Anderson seemed to back away from his previously inescapable obsession with quirky, emotionally stunted bourgeois intellectuals, and the subsequent movies have all been a little less suffuse with mawkish navel-gazing. More important, they have increasingly introduced little flickers of actual conflict (THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, in fact, even sports the vague outline of a thriller plot), which the movies take just seriously enough to give them some much-needed stakes and dramatic punch. It makes them feel livelier and more playful, and consequently the heavy layer of style feels less embalmed. A good example of how a slight tonal shift can make for an enormous difference in the way we react to a film.

Interestingly, none of that does much at all to address my original complaint that Anderson's films are fussily stylized fetish filmmaking with a hollow emotional center. It just reframes that fussily stylized, fetishistic hollowness on a more appealing and entertaining subject, which turns out to be more than enough to get me back on board. I don't know if Ralph Fiennes' affronted comic melancholy in GRAND BUDAPEST is meaningfully deeper than the mopey ennui of the central trio in DARJEELING LIMITED, but I can definitely say it's a lot less annoying. And that puts me in a far more accommodating mood regarding the aforementioned style.

Cue FRENCH DISPATCH, which is probably about peak Anderson. I mean, I really don't know where he could go from here; if it's possible for a Wes Anderson film to be more Wes Anderson-y than this, it's certainly not possible for me to imagine it. Here we see his career-long aspiration to remake the world into a kitschy impeccably manicured diorama reach what surely must be full bloom; every shot, every performance, every set, every word of dialogue, every detail of mise-en-scène has been meticulously crafted until it has no direct connection to reality whatsoever, and instead feels like an artfully constructed living dollhouse meant to evoke the feeling of, though never the actual substance of, a kind of mid-century expat intellectual artistic ethos. Like Tarantino, Anderson has burrowed so deep into his own particular fetishized aesthetics that he has altogether abandoned even the pretense of reality; the movie exists in a fictional French city (“Ennui, France;” great name, no notes) during an extremely fuzzy time period which is expressed entirely through aesthetics rather than history (the film's style cues place the various segments between the interwar period and the early 70's, but their connection to any actual real-life event is so slippery that it’s not even worth trying to pin down). Likewise, some of its characters are vaguely based on real people, but not in any direct way: more like they were adapted from a half-remembered anecdote he heard once at a dinner party, and then thrown into fictional situations which themselves vaguely reflect the works of a mélange of other artists and art forms. We’re accustomed to art which utilizes an element of artifice to try and depict a familiar reality; THE FRENCH DISPATCH entirely reverses that sentiment, using a few disconnected elements of reality to try and conjure a familiar artifice.

And even that is perhaps too direct; it is, essentially, a simulacrum of an aesthetic, a warm nostalgia for something never actually experienced, the world recreated as a pastiche of a parody of a cliché of a rosily-remembered yesterday -- perhaps the inevitable destination of an artist who has always seemed most comfortable navigating his way back to human experience through dense layers of arch signifiers. At any rate, it deliberately puts the maximum possible distance between the viewer and anything remotely resembling lived reality, cheerfully breaking realism (as we see early on, when a waiter climbs a Rube Goldberg machine of stairs with impossible rapidity) or outright abandoning it altogether (as the film's final segment replaces an action sequence with an animated cartoon). And yet, somehow, it doesn't feel entirely like the fastidiously overbuilt novelty that it probably ought to; it feels like an ornate stained-glass window, something blatantly artificial which filters the light of genuine human emotion into its own fussy patterns, but still unmistakably lets it slip through.

And this is especially fitting given the film's loose but unmistakable focus on art itself. What better way to ruminate on the meaning and value of the human creative impulse than to place the artifice squarely in the foreground and let the humanity play out behind its unpredictable refracting surface? To whit, we are presented with three stores (yes, it’s Anderson’s first anthology film!) all connected through the writings of three journalists working for the New Yorker-esque French Dispatch, a highbrow periodical with an eccentric staff (vaguely inspired by real journalists; the film ends with a dedication to “Harold Ross, William Shawn, Rosamond Bernier, Mavis Gallant, James Baldwin, A. J. Liebling, S. N. Behrman, Lillian Ross, Janet Flanner, Lucy Sante, James Thurber, Joseph Mitchell, Wolcott Gibbs, St. Clair McKelway, Ved Mehta, Brendan Gill, E. B. White, and Katharine White.”) The first story finds a wealthy huckster (Adrian Brody, hey, nice to see you’re still alive!) trying to get rich by hyping the art of the incarcerated, criminally insane painter (Benicio del Toro); the second finds a reporter (Frances McDormand) getting a little too personally involved in a quixotic (and somewhat unfocused) student rebellion; the third finds yet another reporter (Jeffrey Wright), invited to sample the Ennui police department’s fine cuisine, instead becoming a witness to a diabolical kidnapping plot.

Amazingly, all three vignettes (and two much shorter ones which form something of a framing narrative) are pretty great. Man, what was the last anthology you could say that about? The student rebellion feels a little slighter than the other two to me, but maybe it’s just because I’ve never seen any of Godard’s “revolutionary period” films (LA CHINOISE, TOUT VA BIEN, etc) which it’s obviously riffing on. In the other two sections, though, Anderson seems unstoppable. In the first, Benicio de Toro proves an inspired addition to his stable of actors, bringing just a hint of live-wire danger to Anderson’s quaint little world***, and balanced to utter perfection by steely Lea Seydoux as his domineering model/muse. The episodic nature ensures things stay brisk, and the jokes are varied and sharp, ranging from egghead meta-humor (the actor who plays the young version of del Toro’s character [Toni Revolori, “Marvel’s Flash Thompson”****] physically enters the frame with del Toro to symbolically hand the role over) to out-and-out slapstick (there’s a wheelchair fight which is probably second only to BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY) all in the service of a sublimely delivered shaggy dog story about an inconveniently located fresco. Highly delightful, note-perfect stuff.

It is, however, the final segment that really lingers with me; not for the plot, necessarily, which is a silly, twee little lark and marks one of the few times the movie strays close to being a little too cute for its own good (the animated sequence, obviously riffing on Tintin comics, has the unfortunate effect, also felt in GRAND BUDAPEST, of defanging a potentially exciting sequence rather than complementing it), though it all looks too breathtakingly ravishing in high-contrast, ultra-manicured black and white to stick in the craw. No, the key here is its central performance, which finds Jeffrey Wright as a loquacious, openly gay reporter (with shades of James Baldwin[!]) reflecting back on an incident from his early days. The story is a silly thing, but Wright’s performance isn’t. He’s fucking phenomenal, taking one of Anderson’s characteristically chatty intellectuals with a melancholy side and going way beyond the material to turn it into something profoundly rich and rewarding.

There’s a moment where he’s been sitting in jail for a few days, having been busted in a raid on a gay club. Bill Murray’s editor character comes by to bail him out and offer him a job, and he’s so moved by this unexpected good turn that he sheds a tear, to which Murray returns with his monotone catchphrase, “no crying.” It’s a good scene in itself, but Wright is so spectacularly emotive that his performance fleshes the whole incident into something much deeper. Without him saying a word about it, we suddenly get an insight into the true plight of this fast-talking caricature. He’s black, American, intellectual, and gay, far from home without any real prospects, an outsider everywhere on Earth, maintaining a charming façade which no one even cares enough to probe beneath into the vast gulf of loneliness that underlies his confident pose. The tiny gesture of goodwill and kinship he gets from this eccentric old white man is maybe the first unsolicited bit of kindness and help he’s received in years, the first time he doesn’t have to just pretend to be happy, and all he can think to say is “thank you” – but that line is loaded with so much pain and relief and naked gratitude, and then the simultaneous realization of how pathetic it is that such a small things means this much to him, and the profound hurt that comes rushing back to him in even that microsecond of vulnerability where he’s let his protective persona down… it’s two words, but it contains all that and much more. It’s still a deeply affecting gut-punch even recalling it now, weeks later. Wright is an actor I’ve seen in plenty of things, and he’s always professional, but this is a whole other level: an astounding performance, funny, complex, and heartbreaking without giving even an inch on the silly, mannered quality which is essential to Anderson’s work. A masterful comedic performance, with an underlying of pathos that deepens the comedy, all within the bounds of a very specific and distinct character totally unlike any other I can think of. And all that, in one segment of an anthology film which isn’t even directly about him, and with a framing narrative on top of it!

It's Wright who really takes this thing to the next level, (he’s working with Anderson on his next film too, thank god!) but the fact that the movie is capable of receiving a performance like that without getting swamped by it says something about the surprising sturdiness of a work that might superficially seem like a whimsical little bauble. Anderson’s tetchy fetish for a particular visual style is imminently parodiable, and sometimes seems a little limiting (maybe even self-limiting; I think it’s telling that even with an exciting car chase sequence he seems unwilling or unable to engage with it on an unironic level*****) but his core fundamentals have only gotten stronger. There’s a sequence here where Wright wanders through a maze of different rooms in a sprawling, impossibly labyrinthian building in what appears to be one long take with the camera gliding seamlessly around him to frame each new location with casual eloquence. And I mean, in any other movie, we’d have spent 2,000 words just talking about that. Anderson may be a little rigid, may be a little formulaic, but you can’t argue with the pure mechanical precision required to pull something like that off and make it look easy. And the way that messy human emotion spills through the cracks of his ossified style is too precise to be accidental; this is clearly the work of a artist who is not simply hiding behind a defensive wall of protective aesthetics (like Wright’s character!) but one who is using those aesthetics to refract emotions. To focus them, distort them, filter them, perhaps, but nevertheless to use the miracle of artifice to clarify something very real. It’s kitschy, maybe; frivolous, perhaps, insufferably whimsical to some. But it’s not hollow.

And what else is art supposed to be for, anyway?



* All this, I should, mention, ignores his debut BOTTLE ROCKET which is so clearly an outlier within his filmography that it doesn't feel like a useful point of comparison.

** Particularly galling given how frisky and savage the beloved Roald Dahl book it's ostensibly adapted from is. I adore Dahl and freely concede that my hatred of the Anderson’s wussy adaptation possibly blinds me to the movie’s quality as a separate artistic object.

*** Really a first for Anderson; he’s worked with tough guy actors like Bruce Willis, Gene Hackman, and Harvey Keitel (!) in the past, but this is surely his first character who seems able to back up his bluster with actual menace. He’s not just a gruff teddy bear, he’s an actual unbalanced murderer. Also, while I have you down here, I just want to remind you how hilarious it is to imagine a deeply unimpressed Gene Hackman just spending every single day on ROYAL TENNENBAUMS relentlessly bullying fancy-pants little Wes Anderson until the guy was scared to even come into work. I mean, obviously, bad behavior, sure, but in this case objectively comedy gold. In fact, Wes Anderson should really make a movie about it. Get Hackman back out of retirement to come play himself and make Anderson suffer through the whole thing again to create the greatest movie ever made.

**** Whatever that means. I thought The Flash was a DC thing? Who knows anymore.

***** Though this is the first Anderson film which has some noticeable stirrings of actual horniness, to its immense benefit. But I guess you can’t really make a pastiche of French cinema without some horniness, so maybe he had no choice.