Wes Anderson is beyond debate a filmmaker that has made quirky, offbeat movies. Everything from The Royal Tenenbaums to The Life Aquatic With Steve Zizzou to The Grand Budapest Hotel has his eccentric sensibilities on every frame.
His latest effort, The French Dispatch, is no exception. Rich with his visual aesthetic punctuated with exceptional performances from its outstanding cast, the movie mostly succeeds in putting another feather in his cap.
The movie is an anthology series of stories that occasionally interconnect. It centers around Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray), the editor of the newspaper known as the French Dispatch, who dies of a heart attack. As his staff goes through his will to prepare to publish the final edition of the publication, we’re treated to three articles that serve as the focal point of the film.
Note: Howitzer’s favorite quote that he uses with his staff is: “Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.”
The first plot thread entitled The Concrete Masterpiece involves a mentally disturbed artist named Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro) serving a sentence for murder in Ennui, France. His latest subject is a prison guard (Lea Seydoux) with whom he begins a relationship. Adrien Brody costars as an art dealer who is desperate to acquire his work.
The second story called Revisions to a Manifesto deals with Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), a journalist for the Dispatch who shares about a student revolution in Ennui in which a game of chess dictates which way the revolution will go. Krementz is determined to maintain “journalistic neutrality” despite having a fling with one of the revolutionaries (Timothee Chalamet).
The third story is called The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner and it follows a food journalist named Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) detailing his dinner with the Commissioner of the Ennui police. The dinner is interrupted when the Commissioner’s son is kidnapped by criminals and this thread becomes more of a cat-and-mouse sequence than focusing on any one individual character.
The performances in each thread give a sense of depth and purpose to each story. In addition to Murray and the rest that are mentioned, we also get brief but memorable work from the likes of Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinson, Christoph Waltz, Edward Norton and Willem Dafoe.
This is not Anderson’s best work nor most ambitious, but it does set out to create in his own words “a love letter to journalism” and that love letter is written all over the screen. It’s a voyeuristic journey into the minds and hearts of these characters and how and why they love what they do.
The look of this movie is fantastic in its execution. Everything from the terrific production design recreating Ennui in its different time periods to Alexandre Desplat’s score, make us know that Anderson is in charge of his craft and he’s telling his story.
Grade: B+
(Rated R for for graphic nudity, some sexual references and language.)
