The French Dispatch

 

     Wallace Wolodarsky, Bill Murray and Owen Wilson at work. American Impirical Pictures imaes via IMDB,

Movies tend to get divided into genres – drama, comedy, action, documentary, animation … But classification schemes don't work with filmmaker Wes Anderson. He's his own genre. The only way of accurately describing his work is to say, It's a Wes Anderson movie. 

Film fans will know exactly what you mean.

The latest doorway into his imagination – as usual, brightly colored, wiggy, whimsical, wistful – comes under the masthead “The French Dispatch.” It's a fictitious literary magazine that might easily be mistaken for The New Yorker if it were not based in the petite French city of Ennui on the banks of the river Blasé … 

Neither of these destinations can be found on any actual map, of course.

How the magazine evolved from “Picnic,” the Sunday features section of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Star newspaper into a literary publication with a half-million readers is the first of the shaggy dog stories Anderson and writing collaborators Roman Coppola and Hugh Guinness cobble into a script. Why it's in France rather than New York is probably because Anderson wanted to work in France, right up to unveiling the film at Cannes. 

Its time frame? Sometime … in the past …

The film is like an issue of the magazine, divided into New Yorkerish articles, complete with artists' renderings in place of photos. In this issue are a 24-hour bicycle tour of Ennui by Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson) and a feature on how incarcerated mad murderer Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro) becomes an avant-garde modern art sensation with help from hustling art dealer Julian Cadazio (Adrien Brody) and his uncles Nick and Joe (Bob Balaban and Henry Winkler). There's in-the-trenches reporting on a French university student uprising by Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), typed in the bed of student revolutionary leader Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet). And let us not forget the intricately plotted crime story about the abduction of a police chief's son, reported by Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright).

If just reading the names of the contributors doesn't bring a smile to your lips, you're probably not part of Wes Anderson's target audience.

Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray) is the magazine's founder and editor-in-chief, trying to affect the hard-boiled literary aplomb of great New Yorker editors of yore. (The filmmakers provide a list of them in a dedication at film's end.) Despite his inclination to be a grammar Nazi, Howitzer turns out to be more of a mother hen trying to keep his loony bin of contributors producing copy while keeping his financially challenged magazine afloat.

Lea Seydoux and Elizabeth Moss are among the the newcomers to the Wes Anderson universe, joining regulars like Tilda Swinton and Willem Dafoe who, like Bill Murray and Owen Wilson are usually along for the ride whenever the filmmaker starts a new project. You get the sense that cast and crew are devoted to him, and making his movies is more like a family gathering than your standard lights, camera, action.

“The French Dispatch” has been described a love letter to a sort of journalism that existed, it reminds us, in a distant time and faraway galaxy. The wit in the wordplay comes at breakneck speed, quite self-satisfied and delighted with itself, whether the audience can keep up or not.

But for all the feats of language– ranging from soaring and poetic to tortured and ridiculous – Anderson is first and foremost a visual artist. Actually, in this case, more of a cinema artiste. The film is in black and white and color. Sometimes in the same shot. It's live action, and stop action, and entirely animated action. Sometimes in the same shot. His color palette and set designs are comedies all by themselves. His tracking shots, like the one through the municipal police station, passing through one wall after another into room after room of choreographed zaniness are both mind-boggling and hilarious.

Wes Anderson's trademark is also his liability for mainstream audiences who prefer the Marvel Universe or more accessible emotions on screen. You watch Wes Anderson's movies rather than feel them. Even when he takes on life's biggies – love … death … art … – we watch, rather than experience. He walks an artistic tightrope, rarely more than a step or two away from falling into the precious artistic pretense he's trying to puncture with his cleverness.

His is an amazing talent, employing one of the most original toolkits in filmmaking today, technically as well as artistically, to bring to the screen a wondrous imagination that remains, remarkably enough, innocent and childlike.

What he does isn't for everyone.

He makes Wes Anderson movies.

I can't wait to watch this one again.