Movie Reaction: The French Dispatch

Formula: (1/3 * Wes Anderson Movie) + (1/3 * Wes Anderson Movie) + (1/3 * Wes Anderson Movie)

 

At this point, if you are surprised by a Wes Anderson movie, it’s on you. Perhaps in the days of The Life Aquatic or The Darjeeling Limited, with the likes of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore not that far in the rear view, you could remark on how you didn’t expect that language, wry sense of humor, or strict camera work. We’re over 20 years and 10 films in now. At this point, you can debate if he’s improving as a filmmaker, but he’s certainly getting better at making a Wes Anderson movie. Personally, Anderson is a director I don’t have the stamina for. His films tend to feel oppressively structured in dialogue, performance, and framing. I get how he has such diehard fans. It just doesn’t click with me the same way.

 

On paper, The French Dispatch is a great formula for a Wes Anderson movie for my optimal enjoyment. It’s an anthology film broken into three parts with a couple small interstitials. It’s structured like an issue of the fictional magazine that gives the film its name. Each short is ~25 minutes with a different narrator and slightly different voice. Breaking an Anderson movie into bite-sized chunks means that a story is over before it gets too tedious. Certainly, that’s how I felt after a very short travelogue segment with Owen Wilson and the first major short, about Benicio Del Toro as a genius but violently insane artist working from prison. It ended right when it needed to and I was quite optimistic about the movie. Then came the second segment with Frances McDormand following a student rebellion led by Timothree Chalamet and Lyna Khoudri. That’s when I realized that several segments meant even more place-setting, loquacious narration, and detailed camera shots. I realized The French Dispatch isn’t Wes Anderson broken into digestible chunks. It’s Wes Anderson compacting entire meals of flavor into each course of a three-course meal. In other words, The French Dispatching got exhausting. By the time it got to the final segment about Jeffrey Wright as a food critic enjoying a renowned prison chef’s cooking on a particularly eventful night, I was too drained to enjoy it as much as I’d’ve liked.

 

I think The French Dispatch is a really good Wes Anderson movie. Had I been able to watch each part on separate days, I may even be raving about it. Altogether, it’s a lot of Wes Anderson and best enjoyed by his specific fans. The movie feels like an excuse for Anderson to flesh out a few ideas that he could never turn into a full feature. I wouldn’t mind if more directors did that. The movie does feel a little lazy though. Two of the three stories use the backdrop of a prison. Is that the only thing he can come up with for this fictional French town in the 1970s? At that point, I’d almost prefer that the stories were interconnected. As always, I did hit a point in the movie where I just wanted to shake Wes Anderson and say “We get it. You’re smart”. That’s common with all of his movies though. The variety is the main thing about the movie that kept me positive about it.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend