The French Dispatch review: Wes Anderson loves the New Yorker and the New Wave

Wes Anderson’s meticulously crafted omnibus narrative The French office takes her quest for beauty to new levels, but struggles to turn it into more than just a visual exercise. His rotation through a group of remote correspondents begins with a compliment: Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), based on The New Yorker founder Harold Ross, has died. A native of the Midwest inspired by his youthful travels to France, Howitzer wanted to send the events of Ennui-sur-Blasé back to the cornfields of Kansas. So he founded a flexible magazine, The French office, as a complement to The evening sun.

The film does not address how Howitzer died. Anderson only points out that he passed away on his desk, and that his dying wish was the Shipment to stop being published after his death, with the final issue dedicated to his obituary. The rest of the film takes place before his passing, following how his low-key energetic defense of his neurotic journalists and nonchalant demeanor helped guide the stories that made each issue. Her favorite advice for her writers: “Try to make it look like you wrote it that way on purpose.”

The film is divided into five separate vignettes, each of which is an informed column belonging to a specific section of the newspaper, written by one of the journalists. As is often the case with anthology-style films, some sections work better than others. Anderson’s penchant for dry comedy used to explain pain, the inner workings of dysfunctional people, and children experiencing loss of innocence is back to the fore. And yet this is the least digestible job of the director. Supposedly it is a love letter to the New Yorker of yesteryear, but while The French office Featuring Anderson’s familiar aesthetic flair, he’s often a distant bus that can attract only his most ardent fans.

From the beginning of the movie, it’s hard to square the emotional line. The first story is written by travel writer Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), an exhibition of antics informed by his bike through the seedier areas of Ennui. The second story, “The Concrete Masterpiece,” features an imprisoned sociopathic painter (Benicio del Toro) who catches the eye of an imprisoned street vendor and art dealer (Adrien Brody). Léa Seydoux, who plays a prison guard, is Del Toro’s muse. And Tilda Swinton’s JKL Berensen is the reporter. Neither of these stories is narratively shocking. The fun comes from the actors’ commitment to the part, especially Del Toro and Swinton, as two idiosyncratic characters with little regard for how people perceive them.

Other stories don’t make it either: “Revisions To A Manifesto” sees reporter Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand) profiling unruly students who impose a revolution in May 1968. Dune star Timothée Chalamet, portraying a Dylan-like retaliation of his Lady bird character, is the student leader, while Lyna Khoudri takes on the role of her antagonistic adolescent opposition. Chalamet tackles the role head-on, playing his character with forced confidence, a kind of projected maturity that only serves to obscure his insecurities. Similarly, McDormand is playing a role that he assumed before, with greater success: his character of “severe adult trying to relate to youth” here does not live up to his role in Almost famous.

When these stories come to life, it is due to Anderson’s familiar visual language. He relies on crisp, textured black and white, cool-toned color palette (seems to change color for no reason), and animation. His compositions are always well regarded, but his depth of field is richer and denser than ever. He is clearly composing odes to French New Wave standouts Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Renoir. The only part of the frame that hasn’t been completely done is Elisabeth Moss, who plays a minor and thankless role as the Shipment copy editor. But on the topics of travel, food, art, and politics, Anderson has little to say beyond mimicking other literary styles.

These vignettes are excellent facsimiles of schemers New Yorker columns, but they are not interesting in themselves. They are long loquacious and modest reads, which can be interpreted as an ode to journalism, a type of specific voice report that has apparently been lost today. But Anderson isn’t entirely concerned about the harsh and shifting perspectives of journalists. It is noteworthy to consider how The French office it opens. The film’s narrator, voiced by Anjelica Huston, explains how the newspaper’s sensibilities reflect the personal tastes of its founder.

Anderson The French office It is not simply a love letter to journalism, it is a romanization of an ideal editor. A myriad of scenes find Howitzer analyzing the copy for redundancy, examining the lines of the prose to elucidate the heart of a piece. Although she protests the exorbitant expenses her writers accumulate, their over-counts in word counts, and the way they deliver stories that she didn’t initially assign, she never cuts a column. Find a way to make your writers’ voices work in line with your vision. With that logic in mind, every illustration we see has been chosen to match his tastes, making for a double curation of both the character and Anderson. In a sense, he’s the editor-in-chief of his own movie, arguing with these disparate actors he’s come to trust deeply.

Maybe that’s why The French officeThe final segment has the kindest heart in the movie. “The Police Commissioner’s Private Dining Room” follows Jeffrey Wright as a food critic with a photographic memory of every word he has written. The character appears on a talk show hosted by Liev Schreiber, presumably long after Howitzer’s death. The writer recounts how he met renowned chef Nescaffier (Stephen Park) while visiting a police commissioner (Mathieu Amalric) the night a chauffeur (Edward Norton) kidnapped the commissioner’s son, Gigi (Winston Ait Hellal). It’s a sweet story because Wright’s character is the only one of the journalists who expresses gratitude to Howitzer. His memorial is real, poignant, and without an over-the-top aesthetic flourish, made possible by Wright’s detailed yet vulnerable performance.

The tenor that Wright hits perfectly leads to the film’s complimentary ending. Howitzer’s writers come together to compose their obituary, in tribute to their fallen leader. But there is a lot of bifurcation in this film (the double vision of the artist, the two lovers of Chalamet, etc.), and it is reflected in the duplication of this scene. Anderson’s trusted artists, in a sense, also write a tribute to him, praising his vision and approach. It doesn’t seem like an intentional choice that Anderson made; if it was, I could have personalized this movie earlier.

But considering the overflow of styles, themes and stories, The French office it could reveal more of its genuine charms in successive replays. Yet in a single viewing, the film bears little fruit, at least not until the last 20 minutes, beyond watching the director work his visual magic. For work that moves at a deliberate pace, that may not be enough for non-Anderson acolytes. The French office it is probably the worst film of the director’s career. But even your worst effort is worth it.

The French office It opens in theaters on October 22, with a wider release on October 29.