If he’s anything, Wes Anderson (“The Grand Budapest Hotel,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox”) is a director who needs no introduction. For years he’s been entertaining audiences with his unique brand of off-kilter characters and humor, never losing sight of the heart integral to all of it. Yet, not every film in a director’s repertoire can be a masterpiece, and while his latest work “The French Dispatch” is a showcase for everything the director has learned since he broke onto the scene with 1996’s “Bottle Rocket,” it's also nowhere near a masterpiece.
Set in the fictional French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé, the film follows the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun newspaper as the writers mourn the loss of their editor, played by Bill Murray (“Ghostbusters,” “Lost in Translation”), by creating a final issue and recapping three articles, as well as smaller vignettes, from their three main writers, J.K.L. Berensen, played by Tilda Swinton (“Michael Clayton,” “Vanilla Sky”), Lucinda Kementz, played by Frances McDormand (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” “Fargo”), and Roebuck Wright, played by Jeffrey Wright (“Westworld (2016),” “Casino Royale”).
Anderson’s iconic style is absolutely intact throughout the entirety of the film and on a bigger and bolder display than ever. “Dispatch” is a classic example of a filmmaker using every skill they’ve learned over their career and then some. Stop motion, green screen, changing aspect ratios, subtitles, color changes, it’s all being used to great effect. Anderson also employs a new “real time freeze frame” technique that immediately feels right at home in his style and for the first time in his career, he also employs some two-dimensional animation, and it’ll easily leave fans begging for a full 2D animated film from him. Most shocking of all, for the briefest moment, Anderson abandons his trademark smooth angles and precise turns for a sequence involving handheld cameras that leaves quite the artistic and emotional impact.
The cast is absolutely stacked, even for an Anderson picture. Beyond those previously mentioned, there’s also small roles from Owen Wilson (“The Royal Tenenbaums,” “Wedding Crashers”), Benicio del Toro (“21 Grams,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”), Adrien Brody (“The Pianist,” “The Darjeeling Limited”), Léa Seydoux (“No Time to Die,” “Belle Épine”), Timothée Chalamet (“Little Women (2019),” “Lady Bird”), Lyna Khoudri (“Papicha,” “Gagarine”), Mathieu Amalric (“Munich,” “Quantum of Solace”), Stephen Park (“A Serious Man,” “Fargo”), Liev Schreiber (“Ray Donovan,” “Spotlight”), Edward Norton (“Fight Club,” “American History X”), Williem Dafoe (“Spider-Man (2002),” “The Lighthouse”), Saoirse Ronan (“Little Women (2019),” “Lady Bird”), Elisabeth Moss (“The Invisible Man (2020),” “The Handmaid’s Tale”), and Jason Schwartzman (“Rushmore,” “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”), capping off with narration from Angelica Huston (“The Royal Tenenbaums,” “The Addams Family (1991)”) from time to time. Some of the actors stick around for large chunks of the film, while others are there for mere moments, yet everyone still maintains the trademark Anderson atmosphere and commitment to this surrealist world and style that’s been solidified and has captivated for the last two decades.
Seydoux and del Toro are immediate standouts; their story oozes romance and lust from every pore and the pair make for a wonderful duo, exuding a weird detached love for each other that feels like the most honest thing the film has. Chalamet, Khoudri, and McDormand are all far more comedic than the other stories, and McDormand’s character is the one who goes through the most of an “arc” throughout the film, and they’re a simple delight to behold. Wright, Schreiber, Park, and Amalric are also standouts in the film’s final story that has all the makings of a “Police Squad!” episode that decided to take itself very seriously that week, and that’s not a criticism.
Each story is told wonderfully by its writer, with Swinton absolutely stealing the show as she narrates her own tale, and each has their own style, really giving an insight into the types of work that each of them write and why they write it. In this, Anderson has nailed a clear tribute to writers and journalists, both who do “important” reporting and the little, human interest stories that keep news feeds rolling along. The film is also, broadly, clearly a tale of love, as each of the three main stories features some kind of love at its center, and the frame narrative is about how to properly tribute someone you love. Most interestingly in that regard, Anderson and his co-story-writers Roman Coppola (“Moonrise Kingdom,” “Mozart in the Jungle”), Hugo Guinness (“The Grand Budapest Hotel”), and Schwartzman has delivered a film about how to pay tribute to a great artist not by showcasing their own art, by by showcasing the kind of artists that were allowed to flourish under their wing.
For all the great things “Dispatch” has going for it, and it has a lot, it's missing one crucial element Anderson has typically excelled at and it's easy to see why. The film lacks a true emotional throughline for the entire film. Sure, there are emotional arcs in each of the stories, but the lack of one going throughout the entire film feels everything feeling far more segmented than it could have been. It’s an issue that typically crops up with anthology films, and while it's not impossible to avoid, it's one that isn’t really all that surprising.
“The French Dispatch” may not be his best film, but it's still a wonderfully quirky set of stories from Anderson and his crew. It’s packed with fantastically silly performances with every technical skill Anderson has learned on full display. It doesn’t have the start-to-finish emotional core that Anderson's other projects do, instead providing some delightfully fantastical stories with an equally fantastic frame narrative. It’s a good time, immediately recommended for Anderson die-hards, but for those who have yet to dip into his filmography and have only heard of his greatness, this latest issue from his cinematic zine comes up a bit short. 3.5/5
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