Movie Review: The French Dispatch
While it is nowhere near the heights of director Wes Anderson’s best work, his latest film, The French Dispatch, is a loving ode to the grand tradition of journalism and storytelling at its most granular level. As such, it works, but it tends to get overly bogged down in its sheer verbosity instead of simply allowing the quirky story within to unfold naturally.
The film is told through the realization of a collection of stories taken from the final issue of a fictional American magazine – The French Dispatch – that is published in a fictional French city. Each of these stories is introduced and related by the reporter from the Dispatch who wrote the piece for the magazine, subsequently breaking the fourth-wall thus allowing each reporter to become a character more than a simple narrator.
The editor of said magazine is Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray) and he serves as a sort of bridge throughout the film connecting each writer and story to the larger whole of the magazine itself. It’s an effective technique that serves the narrative well, particularly in the places where the stories become longer than the last and the overall narrative starts to sag a bit. Nevertheless, the motley crew of characters featured in the film (such as Benicio Del Toro as a gifted artist who also happens to be a convicted murderer serving time in prison under the watchful eye of his muse, prison guard Simone [Léa Seydoux]) inhabit the varied and unique personages they are charged with and that magnificent quirkiness allows the film to propel itself forward despite a few areas where things seem to stall out.
THE FRENCH DISPATCH. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2020 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation All Rights Reserved
Other notable performers throughout the film include: Adrien Brody, as Julian Cadazio, an art dealer who takes a shine to the work of Del Toro’s incarcerated artist; Tilda Swinton, as J.K.L. Berensen, the host of a gala presentation on the work of that same artist; Frances McDormand, who plays Lucinda Krementz, a reporter who strikes up a romance of sorts with a young revolutionary named Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet) who in turn secretly pines for Juliette (Lyna Khoudri); and Jeffrey Wright, whose Roebuck Wright, serves as the lynchpin for the longest piece in this issue of the magazine that attempts to cover and conclude a few storylines. Several other actors make appearances in roles that nearly steal the scenes they are in, such as: Steve Park as Lieutenant Nescafier and Owen Wilson as the travelogue reporter Herbsaint Sazerac.
Unfortunately, the performances prove to the highlight of the film as the overall narrative feels like an echo of recent, more cohesive work from the director such as Isle of Dogs (2018), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and even Moonrise Kingdom (2012). Or, possibly even an amalgamation of all of those distinct narrative approaches is at work here as the four films share many of the same writers amongst them.
Overall, The French Dispatch feels like the work of an artist that was created specifically for devotees of his work and, as such, functions less as a cohesive piece than it would otherwise but is still one that speaks to the cognoscenti and will likely be revered in kind.
Mike Tyrkus
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