The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson’s love letter to expatriate journalists of a bygone era, is about as Wes Anderson as Wes Anderson can get, and for those with whom it connects, it’s a film that’ll be just as good (or better) on the twelfth watch as the first.
It’s incredible how closely watching this film resembles the experience of piecing through an issue of a longform magazine like The New Yorker, on which The French Dispatch is ostensibly based. You’ve got Owen Wilson’s segment, a “talk of the town” piece in which Wilson’s character rides his bike wistfully and somewhat melancholically through the streets of aptly named Ennui and comments on its citizens and the passage of time; Tilda Swinton’s segment, a profile of an acclaimed and mysterious artist whose homicidal youth placed him in the company of a prison guard who became his muse and whose pieces spur a modern art movement; Frances McDormand’s segment, an embedded journalism story following a youth countercultural protest movement in the streets of Ennui that culminates in a critical chess match between one of the movement’s leaders and the town’s mayor (and featuring a love affair between McDormand and Timothée Chalamet’s character); and Jeffrey Wright’s segment, a wild but touching story featuring an unexpected kidnapping, the responsible cabal of underworld types, and a legendary police station chef. Each story is engrossing to the point it’s almost sad when each ends and the next begins, and each pulls the viewer (née reader) into its own world.
For the rest of the review, click here and head over to the Martin City Telegraph.
