‘The French Dispatch’ Review: Not Worth a Detour

[peekaboo]

In Wes Anderson’s latest, an offbeat homage to the New Yorker, humor is scarce and boredom abounds.

 

An old joke described the New Yorker as a magazine that made a million subscribers feel like a select few. That’s not so anymore. Far from being an elitist bastion—which it never really was—the magazine is a beacon of excellence in a darkening media landscape. But it’s the New Yorker as a venerable, famously fusty institution that inspired Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch,” a visually distinctive yet utterly inert Dada triptych that’s set in mid-20th-century France. In a fictional French city, to be precise, called Ennui-sur-Blasé where a newspaper with New Yorker-like typography and layouts, staffed with expat eccentrics, has its headquarters and produces articles about politics and culture for its subscribers in Iowa. (The joke being that the New Yorker’s co-founder, Harold Ross, who started his journalism career in France, famously said that his new magazine would not be for “the old lady in Dubuque.”)

So what does the film, playing in theaters, want to make millions of moviegoers feel? Delight in graphic design? Sure, but the filmmaker’s familiar motifs, playful and inventive as they may be, operate in an emotional void. Shared fondness for a vanished era? Why not, except that by now most of the cultural and historical reference points in the production’s preface and three illustrated articles are so obscure as to be meaningless. A sense of superior sophistication in being able to locate the humor, even if it’s hard to pin down the jokes? Maybe, but the movie made me feel inferior for quite a while because I couldn’t locate anything in it that was genuinely funny, let alone join those around me in out-loud laughter.

The production certainly looks like it should be funny, and Alexandre Desplat’s score keeps saying it is. Many of the Ennui-sur-Blasé exteriors were shot in Angoulême, a city in southwestern France whose already picturesque quartierswere given facelifts—or facesags—for maximum quaintness. (The production designer and cinematographer were, respectively, Mr. Anderson’s longtime colleagues Adam Stockhausen and Robert D. Yeoman. ) One of those neighborhoods, we are told by Anjelica Huston’s narration, is the Hobble District, populated by old people. “Old people who have failed,” the narrator adds, a remark that, unfunnily enough, made some in my audience chuckle. The interior sets look funny too, with flattened aspects and dollhouse scales that have become Anderson trademarks. And what goes on inside them is so peculiar that one way to judge the film may be to set all the New Yorker references aside and concentrate on the action that fills the screen.

Elisabeth Moss, Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton, Fisher Stevens and Griffin Dunne

Photo: 20th Century Studios

Or what passes for action. In the preface, Owen Wilson’s travel writer, Herbsaint Sazerac, gets on his bicycle to take us on a tour of the city, while the newspaper’s editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr. ( Bill Murray ), and his oddball staff discuss the absurdist details of the forthcoming issue with studiously straight faces. That’s odd in itself, since faces are usually kept straight to conceal amusement, for which there’s little provocation here.

Front, from left to right: Tilda Swinton, Lois Smith, Adrien Brody, Henry Winkler and Bob Balaban

Photo: 20th Century Studios

The three stories that follow, illustrated with live action and, in one case, charming animation, combine glib mockeries of their subjects—modern art, student revolutionaries and food—with mashups of fragrant old tropes from movies of the period. But the emphasis is on droll appearance and laidback energy approaching stasis, not character or dramatic development. The sole exception is Roebuck Wright, a food journalist played by Jeffrey Wright with piercing intelligence, along with endearing pomposity, plus a mysterious air of melancholy. (The cast, star-studded right down to the cameos, as is often the case in Wes Anderson films, includes Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, Benicio del Toro, Léa Seydoux, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Mathieu Amalric, Christoph Waltz, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan and Willem Dafoe. )

Bill Murray, Wally Wolodarsky and Jeffrey Wright

Photo: 20th Century Studios

In the end, though, the only way to decode all the recherché references and bafflements of “The French Dispatch” is to take Mr. Anderson at his word, that his film was conceived as a love letter to journalism in general and the New Yorker in particular. The skinflint editor played, lackadaisically, by Mr. Murray is based on Harold Ross. Roebuck Wright is supposedly an amalgam of James Baldwin and the food writer A.J. Liebling. The other two stories in the film relate, however outlandishly, to New Yorker reporting pieces by S.N. Behrman and Mavis Gallant. But those writers were serious people doing important work for a worthy publication, not fit subjects for trivialization by whimsicality. Where’s the love?

[acedespace]

Probably the most "Wes Anderson" film to date - he doubles down on his signature casting, staging and picturesque scene construction. That being said, I agree with the reviewer. In refining his arts, I think some of the novelty is lost and it is hard to discern any development in his moviemaking. While the cast is outstanding (!), the film and the story itself is a little not that interesting.