Portrait of the Artist - Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch

By Josh Lancman ‘24
“I’m your movie buddy.”
The man sitting next to me when I saw “The French Dispatch” introduced himself with that somewhat unusual remark, one that maybe wouldn’t be so out of place in the film we were both here to see. I felt like chuckling at his fake sarcasm, but I sat there silently, and I listened to him talk with his identical looking counterpart about how, even though it was a cliche, the retail job he worked 25 hours a day, 8 days a week was slowly killing him, and I started to feel sorry for this man. Perhaps he didn’t realize the cliche of the dreams he hinted at desperately wanting to pursue; of being an actor, a writer, a director, anything, any creative enterprise that would take him away from the world of cold, unengaging and monotonous labor. Even if he had to work sixty hours on a project that would only see the light of day from a small family window where it’s sole showing would be (in his own inventive words), he would do it. This was a man who wanted to escape. No wonder he came to a Wes Anderson film. 

“The French Dispatch”, the latest piece of pastel storytelling from director Wes Anderson, is a Wes Anderson film. Anyone who has seen even two of his works will understand my meaning. Featuring strategically utilized colors, debonair sets and costumes, famous actors in five-minute roles, daddy issues, ennui, broad and simplistic themes about love, connection, purity and the eternality of art, witty dialogue, cartoonish action (quite literally, at one point) and the occasional serious moment that is the absolute opposite of levity (yet just as necessary), this is a Wes Anderson movie of total escapism with still-present human qualities. If you love his works, you will love this movie. 
I, on the other hand, do not love his works. I like his works. Some, like the magisterial “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” set in a mishmosh of Central Europe and a film that this movie desperately wants to be (but in France), are close to masterpieces. Others, like the satirical “Bottle Rocket,” are fun jolts that enter the eyes and ears, but don’t stick around in memory for long. 
“The French Dispatch” falls somewhere in between- it is not incredibly memorable, aside from moments of absolute stylistic audacity like the sudden appearance of a stage play in the second act, but I feel as though its particular flavor, slightly different from the rest of Anderson’s filmography, will grow on me with time. It is not particularly great, yet an enjoyable romp through a reimagining of 1960’s France, an anthology series featuring artistic prisoners, chessboard themed student activists and police cooks, all connected through Anderson’s broad theme of, well, connection, and the journalistic pursuits of the imagined magazine that gives the film its title, a dispatch for the Liberty-Kansas Evening Sun. 
Each of the film’s main stories are presented as articles in the French Dispatch magazine, with the stories’ individual writers narrating over each vignette. Yet the fact that these are stories in a magazine is the only element that intertwines these otherwise solitary tales into a full film, and as a result, “The French Dispatch’s” world feels sparsely populated. The film’s three stories, though each thematically entwined with Anderson’s simplistic, yet endearing, themes of the value of human connection and the liberating power of art, are all completely separate in terms of plot. 
The first, and the worst, is of an genius painter (Benicio del Toro), who is also a condemned prisoner, and his relationships with a prison guard/muse (Lea Seadoux) and a wealthy art dealer (Adrian Brody, in a role obviously meant of Ralph Fiennes in a retread of his performance as Gustave H. in the Grand Budapest). The second vignette is of a student revolution that fails, leaving behind a legacy of idealism figure-headed by its suddenly influential, and muscular, leader (Timothee Chalamet, in the film’s best performance). The third, and easily best, is of a strange meal, tailor-made for on-the-job police, blossoming into a kidnapping and rescuing of the Chief’s son and protege. 
Each story works well on its own, yet due to none of the characters or plot lines crossing over, each feels solitary, as though they simply should have been their own short films. Even the journalist characters feel unnaturally tacked on; none of them meaningfully contribute to the plot except in unimportant additions that feel like small asides for the characters, which makes the film’s entire anthology structure feel like an excuse by Anderson to tie these tales into a film, rather than something purposefully made with that structure. As the Dispatch’s head editor coyly says to his writers, “Try and make it seem like you wrote it that way on purpose”. Maybe it was a message.
Yet while Anderson’s films’ plots occasionally fall short (“The Life Aquatic”’s poor retread of Moby Dick mixed with Jaqcues Cousteau biography comes to mind) his films are always exceptionally beautiful. Not as much so in “The French Dispatch”; The occasional bits of color, symbolically used to represent moments of connection, are as marvelous as anything in one of Powell and Pressburger’s technicolor fantasias, yet the black and white, more commonly used, is not always lit properly. Too much gray fills the image, with blacks too light and whites just a shade too short. Just like David Fincher’s B&W experiment a year earlier in “Mank”, this too falls flat. Personally, I’ve never thought much about whether color is better than black-and-white, generally the latter is more expressive and interesting, but in this film I was eagerly awaiting the momentary flashes of pigmentation. I ended up sorely disappointed visually by Wes Anderson’s worst looking film since “Rushmore”, his sophomore effort. 
Unfortunately, after months of eager anticipation, I did not connect to this disconnected film about connection. I was mostly apathetic about these tales set in the town of Ennui-sur-Blase. While I enjoyed the film, and was engaged throughout like in all of Anderson’s work, I was not invested like in “Fantastic Mr. Fox” or “Moonrise Kingdom,” two better films that are far more worth any viewer’s time.
So while I enjoyed “The French Dispatch” throughout, what drew my attention more was the man sitting on my left, my movie buddy. During the second story, of Chalamet’s failed rebellion growing into an ideological movement with him as its icon, I could see him edging closer to the glowing silver screen in front of us. After the film ended, I asked his name. “Ryan,” he said with a stutter. “Any more?” I asked. “May,” he finished. It seemed as though nobody had ever asked for his name before. I could imagine him wanting to tell me that I should remember it, because maybe I’ll know it one day. Perhaps he connected to this film after all. 
7/10