It’s never been easier to be annoyed by Wes Anderson. Yet for those who can sympathize with the often self-imposed loneliness of a writer’s life (especially an expatriate writer), it’s difficult to balk at his latest, The French Dispatch. Like another Léa Seydoux movie, No Time to Die, meant to be released in 2020, we’re now finally given the green light to see it as it was intended. While there are no Bondian grand spectacles (unless one counts Owen Wilson’s bike sequence), everything about the production is on a massive scale of the same caliber that ratcheted up with the set designs of Grand Budapest Hotel. Accordingly, the attention to detail exhibited by Anderson’s keen eye is without match.
Anderson himself being a long-time expatriate and well-known co-opter of all things “European” (so much so that he garnered a wildly successful Instagram account in his honor called @accidentallywesanderson) was perhaps overdue for his “French film.” After all, the auteur spends much of his time in Paris, and that is the city in which The French Dispatch is meant to take place… though Anderson preferred to home in on the southwestern town of Angoulême. On selecting it as the film’s “Parisian” backdrop, Anderson stated, “We traveled all around France to find a town that could be a neighborhood in Paris such as Ménilmontant, Belleville or Montmartre.”
With the setting established, we see the operations of The French Dispatch (of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun) are housed in a très charmant building in the “Ennui-sur-Blasé” neighborhood. As we’re told by Anjelica Huston, the narrator of the first segment, Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), the publication’s editor-in-chief, came to find himself in such a position after convincing his wealthy father, owner of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, to let him open an offshoot bureau of the newspaper in France. “It began as a holiday…” Huston explains. And ends up becoming a lifelong calling. It’s no secret, of course, that most people who sustain their “career” as a patron of the arts must have deep pockets. And The French Dispatch makes no bones about such a fact, with Howitzer possessing the freedom to become a beloved editor as a direct result of his familial ties. Sadly, the very reason The French Dispatch requires its time period to be set in the twentieth century is because this was the last era when patronage could be at least somewhat counted upon in the arts. In the present epoch, it has all but disappeared as the rich seem to invest more and more in themselves (a.k.a. their escape plan when everything on Earth finally goes to full-stop shit).
And here one must give Anderson his due for exploring this defunct phenomenon, for maybe it will reinvigorate how people see the importance of patronage to the creation of art. Real art, not “TikTok art.” Apart from Anderson with this movie, no one with a mainstream commercial platform ever really explores in great depth how terrible it is to be an artist. Sure, it might be glamorized via scenes of drinking and smoking in cafes (as Anderson and his film subject doppelganger, Woody Allen, like to display), but, for the most part, it’s more like what Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro) endures in the segment called “The Concrete Masterpiece.” Accordingly, reviews of The French Dispatch don’t really seem to know how to “handle” the topic of an artist’s torture, choosing to sidestep it altogether with hollow headlines like, “Let’s Talk About Tilda Swinton’s French Dispatch Caftan,” Wes Anderson’s French Dispatch is Amusing, and Very Anderson-y,” “The French Dispatch is Charming and a Little Weird.” All such non-statements for a movie that taps into the inherent sadness of the writer’s life. Critics are seeming to miss the larger point that The French Dispatch is a rumination on how being an artist is an automatic ticket to being ostracized from society. Unless, of course, you happen to find the one curator of art who gets you. Or at least tries to. Whether that’s an editor or an art dealer, the point is, every artist needs someone with a “platform” to believe in them in order to better nurture and encourage that art.
The audience, like the readers of The French Dispatch, is already made aware from the outset that what follows is to comprise the final issue of the publication, for it is stipulated by Howitzer that the dispatch shall cease to exist upon his death, which is precisely what happens at the beginning of the film, upon Howitzer’s seventy-fifth birthday (a little young, but maybe believable because we’re presumably supposed to be somewhere in the 1960s/early 70s). One rather wishes that had actually been the case with the editor-in-chief on whom Howitzer is based on, The New Yorker’s co-founder, Harold Ross. For we might have then always remembered the magazine as it was, not as it is. Because what Ross wanted to bring to the world of literary magazines was a fiercely anti-hoity-toity aura. The New Yorker of now, however, seems to think itself endlessly erudite.
One thing that the twentieth century-era The French Dispatch and The New Yorker share in common for certain is their ability to attract a ragtag gang of writers. Misfits in life who are embraced in the alternate universe Howitzer has effectively created for them to at last be themselves in. Once we’re introduced to the “office environment”—complete with that one writer who never writes, just skulks the halls and reads (à la Fran Lebowitz)—Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson) takes us on a bike tour of Ennui-sur-Blasé. His voiceover paints a portrait of the neighborhood that brings to life the scenes we’re shown—ranging from prostitutes to an alley of pickpockets to a man using a public urinal. In effect, all the things one associates with the “real” Paris. As another character based on a real figure, Joseph Mitchell, Sazerac, too, offers the style of the detailed observations of everyday people that make up the city.
It wouldn’t be an Anderson movie without the putting on of a play featured somewhere within it—in this case, one that focuses on what spawned the student revolution in the “Revisions to a Manifesto” segment: a young soldier’s suicide (memorably played by The End of the Fucking World’s Alex Lawther). Declaring that he can no longer imagine himself growing into an adult in the world his parents established, he jumps out the window. Thus, the revolution is born. Part homage to Mai ’68 and the writer Mavis Gallant, Frances McDormand as Lucinda Krementz highlights the idea that one has to be more committed to writing than anything in the world in order to truly do it. And being a female writer adds even more fraught issues to that commitment. Even in the present, women are still expected to adhere to certain domestic conventions that put a wrench in giving full attention to writing. Thus, one of the moments that should most make any writer with a vag stand up and cheer is when Lucinda explains to the friends trying to set her up on a blind date (played by Christoph Waltz) that a husband and children are the two greatest hindrances to writing. Why should she want to bother with that when she’s made her decision on what she’s devoted to and in love with? A love that, like the kind with a human, can also make one feel at times as though she’s not getting anything back in return. Yet, even so, she can’t help what she loves. As is the case when she falls for the much younger subject of her article, Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet). Despite his relationship with the age-appropriate Juliette (Lyna Khoudri)—another character, along with Simone the Gardienne (Seydoux), who makes one feel certain that Anderson has a costume fetish—Zeffirelli also falls for Lucinda’s “old womanly charms.”
When she comes face to face with Juliette, breaking any remaining notions of “journalistic neutrality,” Zeffirelli tries to cool things off between them by explaining to Juliette that Lucinda is a writer, and it’s a lonely life. Possibly the only occasional break in that loneliness is commiserating with other writers. The sidebar stipulation here being: this, again, is supposed to be the twentieth century, when fellow writers were actually more interesting.
All of The French Dispatch is told in that meta sort of way that demarcates the editing process itself. Which is precisely what Woody Allen did with the voiceover technique in Manhattan. And yes, in numerous fashions, Anderson is an extension of Allen (hopefully minus the part where he’s a sexual predator). Although Allen—particularly these days—only wishes he could execute as fully and bombastically his vision. Funnily enough, upon exiting the theater, one could overhear a pompous white male conflating Anderson and Allen by commenting how the only other thing he saw by Anderson was Midnight in Paris, equally as “dry.” But one can’t expect non-writers or pseudo-writers to understand that this film is very much a love letter to this masochistic lifestyle.
The critique from those watching the movie “objectively” (apart from the usual casting surfeit of white people) is that Anderson is being too verbose and overblown. In this regard, another Andersonian parallel is Guy Ritchie, who also has the marked white male tendency to over-narrate. The vignette-style structure can even harken back to Quentin Tarantino’s modus operandi (in any one of his films, but let’s give a special shoutout to the under-appreciated Four Rooms).
For the final story, “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner,” Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) serves as a composite of James Baldwin and A. J. Liebling (though more the latter). His typographical memory allows him to recite from his work to an interviewer on TV (Liev Schreiber), specifically the story of the Commissaire’s (Mathieu Amalric) kidnapped son, Gigi (Winston Ait Hellal), within the lens of renowned chef/police officer Lieutenant Nescaffier’s (Stephen Park) world. After putting his own life at risk to rescue the child, he lies prostrate on a gurney telling Roebuck that the poison he put in his food was almost a joy to consume—for it was a taste he had never experienced before. A rarity for someone of his age. When Roebuck commends him for his bravery in agreeing to taste the food so as to assure the kidnappers of their own safety before they ate it, Nescaffier replies, “I’m not a hero. I just didn’t want to be a disappointment. I’m a foreigner, you know.”
Roebuck nods knowingly (like Baldwin being the forever expatriate), understanding that the foreigner is one who leaves behind what can’t be found in his place of origin. Always seeking and never finding. Incidentally, this was a portion of the article Roebuck cut out entirely, with Howitzer being the one to advise him that it’s the entire reason for the story to be written. Ah, the keen eye of an editor.
More niche-to-the-commoner moments come as the film returns to Howitzer’s death scene. A writer inquires, “Is someone from the morgue coming to pick him up?” Another replies, “There’s a strike.” Only those familiar with living in France might get a “chuckle” out of that.
The death of Howitzer is an undeniable signal of the overall knell for good writing as the century inevitably wears on. After all, there are so few editors willing to let a writer simply “be” without trying to mold them into something that “sells more copies” (or today, “gets more clicks”).
“What happens next?” asks the final line of the movie as the staff rallies to complete the issue to honor Howitzer’s memory. It’s the question every writer is constantly demanding of themselves in their work, for it is often too painful to direct that query toward their own real life.
