The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun has enormous hype surrounding its release. It's Wes Anderson's first live-action film since the Best Picture-nominated The Grand Budapest Hotel. After several release delays, many were hoping this film would be the one that revives arthouse moviegoing. Unfortunately, The French Dispatch is another highly anticipated "industry-saving" movie that isn't that good -- akin to Christopher Nolan's Tenet.
On a craft level, The French Dispatch is up to Wes Anderson's usual standard. The eccentric director continues to push his hyper-specific style further and further with each film. While The French Dispatch might be the worst Wes Anderson film, it might also be the most Wes Anderson film. The film's combination of dollhouse sets, symmetrical framing, multiple aspect ratios, transitions between color and black-and-white film, typography gags, and animation is visually fun. However, it lacks a compelling story.
There are three main stories in The French Dispatch, each originating from a fictional New Yorker-esque magazine. All three contain interesting elements but end up lacking in substance and emotion. The first, "The Concrete Masterpiece," is carried mainly by a wildly intense performance from Benecio Del Toro, playing a deranged murderer who happens to be a talented modern artist. It's the most compellingly weird of the three stories and lends itself to some solid laughs and vibrant mayhem, but it lands more like a series of anecdotes.
"Revisions to a Manifesto," in which Frances McDormand reports on a group of student revolutionaries led by Timothée Chalamet, seems like a continuation of the more political storytelling Anderson's demonstrated in The Grand Budapest Hotel and Isle of Dogs. The problem is that it's highly unfocused and too abstract. It ends up not really saying anything. At times it approaches a point, but it goes in so many directions that it loses touch with reality.
The last story, "The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner," might be the most unintentionally revealing. Like the previous two stories, it's a grab bag of discordant concepts and scenes that primarily exist for Wes Anderson to indulge his aesthetic interests. Jeffrey Wright's James Baldwin-like character, however, offers a stronger narration. In the story's coda, when the reporter discusses the story with his editor (Bill Murray), it turns out he cut part of the story for being "too sad." After reading the cut paragraph, the editor tells him it's the best part.
Wes Anderson's detractors often call him a "style over substance" director, but his movies up until now have always had an emotional center amidst the twee whimsy. Whether it's the broken family of The Darjeeling Limited, the identity crisis of Fantastic Mr. Fox, or the young lovers of Moonrise Kingdom, there's always some humanity shining through the artifice. The French Dispatch, however, seems scared to engage with any such themes in any depth. It's as if Wes Anderson cut the best part.
Maybe the concept of The French Dispatch was doomed from the start. Remember the Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman movie Adaptation, where Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) struggled to adapt Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief into a movie before realizing he had to turn it into an actual dramatic story? Maybe New Yorker articles and narrative features are just too different as artforms for a movie-as-magazine to really work.
The French Dispatch opens in theaters on Oct. 22.