With The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson pens a dizzying, poignant love letter to The New Yorker
Bill Murray, Timothee Chalamet, and at least a dozen other stars join the writer-director of The Grand Budapest Hotel for his first anthology film
Film Reviews The French Dispatch
It should come as no great surprise that Wes Anderson is a longtime, avid reader of The New Yorker. They share a sensibility, don’t they? Call it an appreciation of the finer things, coupled with a neat and pleasing organizational sense. Anderson, director of live-action movies with the visual imagination of cartoons and cartoons with the soul-deep neurosis of live action, has a style so singular it can be identified from a single frame plucked from the celluloid reels he still shoots on. Yet there is an antecedent for his beloved approach, and one big influence has to be the storied periodical he’s said to have consumed religiously in college, from whose pages he might have drawn a sense of humor at once refined and playful, an affinity for symmetries and pastels, and a voracious appetite for literary pleasures. Were Wes Anderson an airline, The New Yorker would be its in-flight magazine.
The French Dispatch Of The Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, henceforth referred to by the first three words of its title, is Anderson’s love letter to that 96-year-old highlight of mailboxes and waiting rooms—and by extension, to the nearly century of art, writing, and reporting contained within. The publication has been lightly fictionalized as the overseas satellite outpost of an American newspaper—a staff of correspondents based in the made-up French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. Their fearless leader, guiding and “coddling” their peculiarities, is Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), a benevolent crank plainly modeled on The New Yorker’s first editor.
The Royal Tenenbaums, still Anderson’s tragicomic masterpiece, presented itself as a novel unfolding chapter by chapter. The French Dispatch likewise adopts the structure of an issue of its eponymous magazine, recounting three nonfiction reports from its final edition. In “The Concrete Masterpiece,” Benicio Del Toro plays an imprisoned artist, enthralled by a guard (Léa Seydoux) he abstractly paints in the nude, whose record proves no impediment to the buying frenzy initiated by his cutthroat dealer (Adrien Brody). “Revisions To A Manifesto” is Anderson’s tribute to the French student protests of May 1968, with Timothée Chalamet and Lyna Khoudri as idealistic teens who fall in love, even as they drift into different factions of the movement. And “The Private Dining Room Of The Police Commissioner” follows a quirky human interest story about the culinary preoccupations of a law enforcement commander (Mathieu Amalric) as it explodes into a hostage situation.
The anthology format fits Anderson like an Agnelle. Working with a giant ensemble cast of old and new collaborators, he dabbles in puckishly exaggerated art-world satire, pivots to an extended homage to the French New Wave, and finally indulges in one of his signature madcap chases (situated, as is often the case, in the closing stretch). The storytelling is as paramount–and often as dizzyingly entertaining—as the stories themselves. Building on the nesting-doll games of The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson cuts back and forth from the tales to their authors recounting them, on stage during a lecture or on a Dick Cavett-like talk show. He nestles frames within frames.
This sophisticated structural gambit centers the perspective of the intrepid reporters, raising questions about how to contain the uncontainable, to condense all the nuances of real life into a digestible form. One might even call it Anderson’s meditation on his own career-long attempts to impose meticulous order on life without totally denying its inherent messiness. Budding journalists were once taught, in an age before narcissistic memoir hijacked the media landscape, that they are not the story. But Anderson reckons in The French Dispatch with how great reporters imprint themselves on their work without explicitly placing themselves within it.
That each of the writers—respectively played by Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, and Jeffrey Wright—are based on an alum of the New Yorker’s historic contributor pool reflects the sheer, specific depth of Anderson’s homage. (Wright has been cast as the proxy for the most famous of these real-life wordsmiths; his character, amusingly blessed with a “typographic memory,” is a dead ringer for James Baldwin.) To unpack The French Dispatch’s library of touchstones would require multiple viewings and maybe a bibliography; he’s always nodding to a luminary of this field or that, every person on screen a boardwalk caricature of a famous figure. Footnotes would pop with the names of the art dealer Joseph Duveen, the filmmaker Jean Renoir, one-time student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit, mononymous French singer Christophe, the Belgian cartoonist Hergé, and many more.
At this point in his career, Anderson is operating on a level of dioramic detail, density of set design, and compositional precision that his pretenders and bush-league YouTube parodists could never hope to match. Every shot here is an event, a peerless punchline, a work of art, or all three. In addition to the trifecta of vignettes, the film includes a travelogue segment from the magazine’s “cyclist reporter” (Owen Wilson) that functions as an overview of the magazine’s town of operations, and it’s a miniature masterpiece of montage that clarifies Anderson as a kindred spirit to the late, unrivaled French expert of comic framing, Jacques Tati. More than just a head-spinning joke machine, this cinematic “Goings On About Town” runs all of French culture through an alternate-universe filter, adding a Gallic everyburg to Wes World’s growing atlas of storybook locales. (It’s worth remembering that Anderson now lives in Paris; every new movie from him is a French dispatch of sorts.)
Remarkably, he’s still adding new tricks to his bottomless bag of them, including an intentional alternating between color and black-and-white. Many of his most extravagant flourishes here seem catered to the project’s feature-length expression of New Yorker fandom. Scenes of shaky tableaux, of the cast freezing in place and sometimes visibly struggling to hold their position, parallel seven decades of still photography, while also operating as another sly microcosm of Anderson’s whole modus operandi: the way imperfect humanity crucially creeps into his perfect arrangements. A late animated interlude is created in a style that recalls both French comic books and a history of cartooning on and between the covers of The New Yorker. Subtitles, which eccentrically populate bottom to top, contain parentheticals—a textual salute to the digressive asides instrumental to both a vintage Wes effort and a classic page-turner from the pages of this once-weekly mag. Even the editing feels simpatico with The New Yorker’s famously precise comma usage.
The challenge of the anthology format is to get an audience invested in characters that, by necessity, must be painted in quick brushstrokes. The French Dispatch unfolds at montage speed; there is little room for the full Max Fischer fleshing out that even 90 brisk minutes can facilitate. Yet Anderson generously seasons each story with disarming moments. One sneaks up on you with an unexpected casualty, a bright future cut short. Another slaps a startlingly profound encounter at the end; there’s a delight in the way that even the storyteller isn’t convinced that it belongs, while the editor believes it’s the whole emotional fulcrum of the piece. And while “The Concrete Masterpiece” is arguably the funniest of these self-contained episodes, it also contains one of the most poignant gestures: Budapest star Tony Revolori handing a paintbrush to Del Toro, literally passing the baton of the role from youth to old age, bridging decades of incarceration in one shot.
The key to The French Dispatch’s sneaky resonance, tucked into the spaces between its moving parts, is Anderson’s balancing act of reverence and irreverence. He sees the humor in artistic pretension—in the self-seriousness of tortured artists and rebellious youth. But he also believes in their belief systems, or at least their capacity to believe so passionately in something. If he’s lampooning the subjects of each imaginary profile, it’s a fundamentally affectionate lampooning.
Melancholy has always nipped at the edge of his comedies, thwarting detractors’ attempts to reduce his work to some empty, precious, ever-expanding dollhouse of strictly cosmetic concerns. That we’re seeing the final issue of this titular publication is no accident. It speaks to the inherently eulogistic nature of this film in particular, and of Anderson’s recent work in general. Here, he’s bidding farewell to a bygone era of arts appreciation, and penning a valentine to not just the specific New Yorker contributors that sparked his imagination but also to a profession under recent, persistent attack.
The French Dispatch will, of course, speak to any contemporary cog of that debased system—any writer who’s watched their beats or word counts shrink, or their employers diminish the appeal of subjects more esoteric than the lowest common denominator. But speaking of demographics, the one for this movie goes much deeper than just the press corps laboring to wrap its collective head around a typical litany of visual and conceptual intricacies. It should be noted here that the real Liberty, Kansas, has a population just north of three digits. Relocating a bastion of cosmopolitan sophistication to a speck on the map is a joke with reservoirs of deeper meaning. The New Yorker, as founder Harold Ross once quipped, may not be “edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” But it may speak to her anyway, as an American publication relevant to thinkers and aficionados residing far beyond the metropolis for which it was named. Maybe the same could be said of Anderson’s output.
92 Comments
I run hot-and-lukewarm on Wes Anderson, but he’s still appointment viewing for me. Isle of Dogs was one of the most delightful times I’ve had at a movie theater in the last few years.
Isle of Dogs was FANTASTIC… Mr. Fox, not so much, lol.
What? Fox is a much better film, though I did like dogs
Mr. Fox is my favorite of his films (I don’t consider myself a fan). I don’t have a normative complaint about his depiction of Japan, but I don’t think it helped the film artistically that he felt he needed that American exchange student for the material off the island.
I meant no offense, and Dahl is an idol of mine. Fox was good, just not what I hoped, expected, or dreamed of… I have a hard time with almost every Dahl adaptation.I really want to see an all-star dramatic cast do “Danny, The Champion of the World,” but only because there aren’t a ton of fantastic elements and the story is breathtaking regardless.Dahl was a subtle storyteller, even if his more fantastic elements reached out and slapped you in the face.Anderson is a genius, although one I often have a hard time digesting, and Fox was an interpretation of something I never had a problem with, but through his lens, I did.It was too… … hyperactive? I think? IDK, it just didn’t work for me, but as I said, nothing often does w/ Dahl adaptations.
No offense taken when someone at a pop culture site opinions on pop culture that aren’t identical to mine! Fox is hardly a favorite movie of mine, but as a non-fan of Anderson I think he’s better suited to stop-motion than live-action, and I just didn’t think Dogs was as good.
I loved Mr. Fox, too. It’s easily in my top 3 of his films. But I’m also a huge fan of all things Pulp, so Jarvis’s songs really added to the film for me. The fact that he’s doing the soundtrack for French Dispatch, too, is pretty helpful (though I’m not as excited about covers as I would be about originals) Something about Isle of Dogs didn’t… click for me, but I didn’t hate it. The jokes just seemed really obvious. I barely remember the second half of the film.
Wow, complete opposite for me. Loved Fox hated Dogs, may have to give it a view again.
I like these Wes Anderson films: Bottle Rocket, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel. I don’t like these Wes Anderson films: The Darjeeling Limited, The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore. I have no real opinion on: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I haven’t seen: The French Dispatch, Isle of Dogs, or Fantastic Mr. Fox. Cheerio.
sorry here old chap, but why the FUCK should we care? You seem like a real Dudley …
You’re an idiot (sorry)
Wow, we have, like EXACTLY the opposite opinion about what makes for a good Wes Anderson movie.
Have to admit it’s rare to see a like / dislike list that has Tenenbaums and Grand Budapest on opposite sides. I also feel like Life Aquatic and Budapest have a lot in common with their staging and production values.
Having seen The French Dispatch already as well, I do have to agree with Dowd that the scene-setting in this movie really is second to none. Anderson and his team are ON POINT.
Oh, is this the A.V. Clubbers Affirming That Dowd Is Right About The French Dispatch Thread??? COUNT ME IN.
Me three! His absolute best work since Moonrise Kingdom. I can hardly wait to see it again.
The sheer number of paragraphs should tell you how enthusiastic he is about this film. Has to be a record for a first-run review.
Standing up for the notorious Hollywood movie hater A.A. Dowd, are we?It figures the first film in forever he’s given an “A” to would be some precious, airless bit of Wes Anderson arthouse whimsy….Ad-miah Mah SU-perior good Taste!
Nope, this is still an “A-”. A- Dowd strikes again!
That scene where the waiter goes through several levels of the building with the tray is…wow.
Straight from Jacque Tati. 🙂
From what I was reading elsewhere, I was a little lukewarm on whether or not I’d like this–there is a point where we reach Peak Anderson, and at that point he’ll have a reckoning to make. But I must say, this review made me reconsider. I’ll see if I can get a ticket.
The Life Aquatic>Rushmore>Moonrise Kingdom>Grand Budapest>Isle of Dogs>Fantastic Mr. Fox>Royal Tenenbaums>Darjeeling Limited>Bottle RocketCan’t wait to see where French Dispatch ranks.
Bottle Rocket is quality cinema of the highest order.
Oh my, your priorities are fucked up. Life Aquatic dead last. The only film of his I loathe. Watched it again recently to make sure, and yep, it just feels mean spirited to me. Royal Tenaenbaums and Rushmore at the top.
I am craving this film.
Who IS that enormous woman on the right?!
Maybe it’s a teaser for an upcoming Resident Evil: Village DLC where Lady Dimetrescu does a stint as a reporter in France?
Wes Anderson and Lady Dimitrescu!?! Go on…
That enormous woman will destroy us all!
I meant the statue…
Oh, that’s Peggy SWOLEson
Peggy is on the left, not right.
Their right, not ours!!!
So I guess we should be expecting movies about Time and People magazine next as part of the franchise
I would like to see his take on Playboy or MAD.
Why? A movie based on TIME would be about how often journalism bent itself into a pretzel to appease the whims of power, while one based on PEOPLE would be about how journalism ate its own tail in pursuit of subscribers/eyeballs/clicks.::Hums “The Internationale” as I plant The Federation flag::
I’ll be honest, that sounds entertaining. Sort of like a Nightcrawler from Renee Russo’s perspective.
Sounds fackin delightful. Ol Wesley Anderson done did it again. Imma see it.
I can’t think of a more fun job than to be part of the set design/props crew for these films.
You MIGHT want to check out the news about that whole IATSE strike thing that just happened.
Nope, ignorance is bliss!
Were Wes Anderson an airline, The New Yorker would be its in-flight magazine.The French Dispatch Of The Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, henceforth referred to by the first three words of its title, is Anderson’s valentine to that 75-year-old highlight of mailboxes and waiting roomsUhm… The New Yorker has been around since 1925, which makes it 96 years old…
It was banned from mailboxes and waiting rooms for its first 21 years.
Mailboxes weren’t invented yet. Don’t look it up.
The first 21 years were delivered exclusively by carrier pigeon, until the US government shut their delivery program down because they were breeding a super-strain of oversized pigeons that could carry a 4oz magazine for several thousand miles that dropped gigantic shit that could crush schoolchildren.
African or European pigeon?
Shh! Don’t let facts get in the way — he’s on a roll!
…any writer who’s watched their beats or word counts shrink, or their employers diminish the appeal of subjects more esoteric than the lowest common denominator.Well, thank goodness that’s never happened at the AV Club.
“SNL CASTMEMBERS RANKED FROM LEAST TO MOST RACIST!” Slideshow (1/214)
Take your star, that was perfect.
Not to mention this nugget:
Budding journalists were once taught, in an age before narcissistic
memoir hijacked the media landscape, that they are not the story.
We’re to believe that narcissistic memoir is the issue with modern media, as opposed to naked editorializing in supposed reporting pieces? I will note that Dowd is probably the least of the offenders among AVC staff, but found that passage amusing nonetheless.
Oh, be gentle with Barsanti. He’s trying to get this snark thing down pat, and he’ll never get there if he doesn’t keep practicing.
Gotta get your reps in, I suppose.
Sorry, if we have to listen to Right Wing editorializing on False Nuwz, and NeoLiberal bullshit on MSM? You can live with a wee bit of Leftism in your morning coffee, bfred — or run off and hang out with your intellectual inferiors just because you argee w/them politically.
Big difference though is you can quite easily avoid Fox. Love the clever play on words, though.Besides, did I say anything about left or right? Carry your own baggage.
The notion that journalism was at any point a universal bastion of integrity is laughable. There’s always been some journalists with substantial integrity (at least, going back to, say, the early 1900s), and they’ve always been dwarfed by hacks and partisans.
I’m definitely not saying that. I do think you have to break news reporting down into eras, though. Pre-television the moguls who owned newspapers were among the most powerful people in the country and absolutely used their holdings to push whatever agenda they pleased. Obviously I wasn’t around for the early innings of TV, but for much of my lifetime felt most newscasts kept editorializing to a minimum or at least had reasonably delineated news and editorial segments. Now the partisanship is blatant, both in how things are reported, what’s said, and probably most importantly what’s reported at all. I know I’m not the only one who feels he has to go to like three different sources to feel like I’m getting a full story.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply you were saying that; it was more a comment about Dowd’s line about “budding journalists” (and the same, relatively widespread belief that Things Used To Be Better).
Ha, all good. And don’t worry, I’m not that naive about journalism. And Dowd has a point about budding journalists and what they likely see as today’s path to success.
An A- by Dowd – does that mean I have to see it three times?It does seems like a good one. Not sure where it will fall in among my Anderson picks (my favorite of his is The Fantastic Mr. Fox and I don’t know what that says about me).
It says you’re a fool!
Melancholy has always nipped at the edge of his comedies, thwarting detractors’ attempts to reduce his work to some empty, precious, ever-expanding dollhouse of strictly cosmetic concerns. That we’re seeing the final issue of this titular publication is no accident. It speaks to the inherently eulogistic nature of the film in particular, and of Anderson’s recent work in general. Here, he’s bidding farewell to a bygone era of arts appreciation, and penning a valentine to not just the specific New Yorker contributors that sparked his imagination but also to a profession under recent, persistent attack.
It sounds like this’ll make for a good companion piece for Altman’s Prairie Home Companion.
To my annoyance, this isn’t opening here this weekend.
I’m glad so many people are looking forward to this. Go have fun!
But all I see is kitsch, in the Milan Kundera “absolute denial of shit” sense of the word. I see ads for these movies and they always make me wonder what must have happened to the director during his anal phase.
Well there’s your problem: It’s not a phase.
As someone who has been lucky enough to see it… I’d say it might just be his best work yet. It’s certainly my favourite thing he’s done.There’s just such a sense of everyone, Anderson in particular, having so much fun and showing so much joie de vivre in every single scene (and the clever switches between framing and format between, and within, each section just make it seem even more lively and visually vibrant).Wright was definitely the movie’s MVP for me, but there’s very little in it between him and several of the other actors. Also, Léa Seydoux is absolutely breathtaking. I could happily rant on more about it, but I’d rather people discover it for themselves (and hope they enjoy it as much as I did).
So glad this is getting good marks from most reviewers. I desperately need something like this right now. One comment I must take exception to, is implying that melancholy is just a peripheral element to Anderson’s films. I’d argue it’s a central theme to most, if not all of them.
I am literally counting the hours until I see it tomorrow. This and Annette were my most anticipated movies this year.
He sees the humor in artistic pretension—in the self-seriousness of tortured artists and rebellious youth. But he also believes in their belief systems, or at least their capacity to believe so passionately in something. This is how I like to think about art in general. The line between admirable creative ambition and pretentiousness is so blurry, and sometimes unidentifiable in the time it’s happening. You’ve got to give it to people for trying something interesting. Bless Wes and his exquisite little self. His work feels like an oasis at this point. An oasis, not Oasis. That would be terrible.
I know this marks me as the most Philistine of Philistines, but I have never made it through a Wes Anderson film. I admit they’re beautifully shot, but they’re just so boring.
I think this film is going to be a hard sell for the general American populace. It doesn’t look appealing. He really should have chosen a better story, or series of stories for a movie. I am looking forward to Asteroid City, however. *adjusts monocle*
Grand Budapest took in around $175 million on a $25 million budget. I could see this doing something similar. Nothing he does (short of latching on to a franchise sequel, which I can’t imagine happening from the studio perspective) is going to be a blockbuster.
The New Yorker started publishing in 1925. Why do you think it’s 75 years old?
the made-up French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. Good lord, that sounds like Wes Anderson parody rather than actual Wes Anderson, but I like everything off his that I’ve seen, so I’ll roll with it.
Yes, film is a work of art
a classic page-turner from the pages of this once-weekly mag.Just how often do you think it publishes now?
A print magazine? I’ll guess quarterly.
Hard to believe it took so long for the film Dom DeLuise was directing to get to theatres.
Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong! Wheeeeeeeeee.
Seemed like a few years ago, people were wondering if WA would give up the kitsch and ‘cute’ aesthetics. He responded with Budapest, a 100% doubling down, but his storytelling, framing and pacing just keep getting better & betterI saw French Dispatch last night and it’s tremendous. Beautiful, moving, poignant, hilarious
Where do Anderson’s films usually stream? I loved Moonrise Kingdom and Fantastic Mr. Fox (my favorite Roald Dahl book growing up), but I haven’t been able to catch any of his others in theatres (my area has an infuriating habit of screening only blockbusters and Fathom “Jesus movies”, nothing else).
saw this last night and jeffrey wright has a monologue about food and loneliness that very nearly drove me to tears. loved this one a lot.
“To unpack The French Dispatch’s library of touchstones would require multiple viewings and maybe a bibliography…”
I don’t if you are aware, and I didn’t see Dowd mention it in the review, but the closest thing to such a bibliography exists. It’s called “An Editor’s Burial” (link to Bookshop here, to Amazon here, to Barnes and Noble here) and it’s a collection of magazines that Wes Anderson has said are a direct inspiration to this film. I cannot recommend it enough. Like said earlier, Wes Anderson is appointment viewing for me, period. I cannot wait to watch this film.
saw this last night. the film is his most gorgeous. the sets are incredible. the way he shifts from film to cartoon to stage is remarkable.its also his most cold film. theres no heart here. barely a story. at times its confusing.i need to see it again as im sure millions of things flew right past me trying to keep up with everything in the frame.
“No heart there” how? All three stories have pretty strong emotional components, plus the overall sadness of the implied passing of an age.
the only one i found emotionally compelling was the final one. i found the acting to the be the most rigid and stoic of any of his films. at least in bottlerocket, rushmore and tennebaums people acted, for the most part, like people not statues.
So having seen this now, I really enjoyed it! The set design and performances were all on-point, but it moved in a way that a lot of Anderson movies don’t (the animated sequence in act 3 was the most exciting bit in one of his movies since the pirate battle in Life Aquatic). I think the first sequence was my favorite, followed by the third & the second was last. Bill Murray was a wonderful anchor. I don’t know about The New Yorker too much, but I kind of felt like Anderson was saying that Murray is his forever muse, and that he couldn’t picture going on making movies without him (his death causes the magazine to fold).
This was delightful, although I did come away feeling like Elizabeth Moss should have had more to. Even if it wasn’t as meticulous and intriguing as all of Anderson’s films, Jeffrey Wright’s fantastic performance would have sold the whole thing.
Also, it was funny watching this not long after seeing Dune. Weird that Timothee Chalamet acted more expressively and showed more emotion in a freakin’ Wes Anderson film than in the one where he’s a messiah space prince whose daddy gets murdered.
Jeffrey Wright gives the best Wes performance since Gene Hackman as Royal.
First off I have to state that The Onion has always been my go-to for movie viewing decisions. Nathan was great as is this review by Dowd.I will have to see this again because of the speed of the montages. I’m old but obviously there are many layers to this film. It seems that every element was quite good but what really grabbed me were the photographic ‘portraits’ throughout, like the ones of the inmates in the asylum. Great compositions, great lighting. They would all make great prints.