Photo via The French Dispatch/Facebook
Bill Murray in the French Dispatch
Bill Murray in the French Dispatch
Wes Anderson is the director of quirky almost-was, almost-could be worlds. His films are funhouse abstractions of places and the emotional habits of those who live there. With The French Dispatch, Anderson puts his lens to the American expatriates of postwar Paris, an intellectual bright spot inhabited by refugees from Yankee Puritanism and racial bigotry as well as curious minds drawn to Gallic food and culture.
To be clear, in Anderson’s funhouse mirror, Paris becomes Ennui, a shabby but glamorous city where mopeds share the cobblestone streets with horse carts and automobiles of diverse vintage. Women shake their dusty rugs from second floor windows overlooking a boulangerie. Ennui wears an air of promiscuous calm.
The French Dispatch is a fake documentary, a droll comedy about the make-believe magazine of that name whose page design and editorial tone suggests The New Yorker in its golden years. The film successfully juggles several storylines tied to the magazine’s art, “poetry and politics” and food sections, all of them looping back around to the magazine’s editor. Arthur Howitzer Jr., played by Anderson regular Bill Murray, is the deadpan eye at the center of a whirling hurricane of eccentricity. Amidst the clack-clacking typewriters and endless chains of Gauloises, Howitzer presides over an enterprise dedicated to thoughtful, well composed (and copy edited) content from a cast of superb literateurs. He counts centimes with one hand while spending lavishly with the other for deeply researched essays. When asked about cutting an article for space, Howitzer declares, “Shrink the ads instead!”
One of the Dispatch’s storylines concerns a surly Abstract Expressionist, Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio del Toro), first seen in a paint-splattered smock, paint brush clenched between his jaws, studying his nude model Simone (Léa Seydoux). Minutes later the frame widens. Turns out Rosenthaler is confined to prison for homicide and Simone is his guard and demanding muse. The frame expands again to the 21st century—a lecture at an American museum dedicated to Rosenthaler’s work. He would have died in obscurity, we learn, if not discovered by an art dealer doing time for fraud, Julien Cadazio (Adrien Brody).
The French Dispatch’s structure resembles the experience of clicking a series of links to see where they land rather than watching a narrative unfold. Satirized is the romanticized image of the artistic genius, the valiant role ascribed to high-end art dealers (conmen) and collectors (wealthy women with time to kill) and the forging of Modernism’s dubious legends. What did Rosenthaler want to paint? The Future! In a remark Picasso would have applauded, Cadazio adds, “Surely there ought to be a double standard for artists.”
And so it goes as Anderson lovingly spoofs the life and times of his characters. Frances McDormand plays the Dispatch’s Lucinda Krementz covering a student-led revolution whose slogan is: “The Children are Grumpy.” Their barricades are made of manifestos and rhetoric; their struggle against the older generation plays out in a public chess match between Ennui’s mayor and a diffident student leader, Ziffereilli (Timothée Chalamet).
The French Dispatch is a postmodern mix and match informed by history but untethered to historical consistency. 1948 blends easily into 1968. Unlike the Hollywood convention, which insists that movies pretend to be windows to the world as it is, reality in The French Dispatch is a stage set with moveable walls. Deliberate artifice shapes every setting and gesture.
Anderson’s worst films (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Isle of Dogs) are insufferably self-enclosed, precious and twee. However, The French Dispatch is thoroughly entertaining, both for its network of stories and straight-faced performances by an international cast (look for Owen Wilson, Anjelica Huston, Tilda Swinton, Liev Schreiber, Willem Dafoe, Henry Winkler and many other stars). With The French Dispatch, Anderson gave himself a theme he seems to deeply care about: the value of good writing and nostalgia for a time when good writing had a large, appreciative audience.
The French Dispatch opens in Milwaukee theaters on Oct. 28.
