'The French Dispatch': Wes Anderson Dazzles With A Whimsical New Missive Of Wit & Short Story Delights [Cannes Review]

July 12th, 2021, Cannes – Reader, I ratatat out this missive in haste on my trusty Smith-Corona from the South of France, in the paltry hopes it may adequately convey my delight in viewing the latest cinematographic marvel from Mr. Wes Anderson, originally of Houston, Texas but more latterly resident of a nearby color-coded, symmetrical nebula almost entirely of his own design. “The French Dispatch,” Mr. Anderson’s entry in the competitive section of what we francophones like to call Le Soixante-Quatorzième Festival de Cannes, is a work of such unparalleled Andersonian wit, that at times the sheer level of detail – mobile, static, graphic and typographic – that bedecked the screen was enough to make your correspondent’s jaw slacken. Which meant curtains for the carpet as I was smoking a cigarillo. 

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Rug repair bills aside, from essentially the first moment that the dazzled viewer is introduced to the moving picture’s location – a French town glorying in the moniker Ennui-sur-Blasé, on which an average of 190,000 flakes of snow fall per year and from whose canal an average of 8.2 bodies are dredged per week – Mr. Anderson delivers such a dense and barmy barrage of minutely imagined wonders (not least a complete and perfect recreation of the famously ramshackle house from Mr. Jacques Tati‘s “Mon Oncle“) that it leaves one in something of a quandary. “The French Dispatch” must be seen on the largest imaginable movie screen in order to bask in the level of care crammed into every corner. Yet simultaneously, one longs for some sort of device that would slow, or ideally, stop the unspooling at will, the better to examine its intricacies. Perhaps a crisp ten-franc note palmed to the projectionist at your local movie palace will convince him to play the film at half speed, though I doubt that will quite do the trick either. 

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“The French Dispatch” will inevitably be described in rival publications as a “love letter” to journalism – especially that of the mid-century trans-Atlantic variety – but in truth, it is a sheaf thereof, a series of four short films that mimic the cadence and character of the more wackadoodle New Yorker magazine feature, bookended by a prologue and an epilogue dealing with the death of the eponymous magazine’s first and only editor-in-chief, Arthur Howitzer Jr (Bill Murray). Since the magazine, which is a subdivision of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, is mandated to be shuttered after his demise, the film becomes both the magazine’s last issue incarnate and an encomium to Howitzer Jr himself, the kind of dream editor who wouldn’t red-pen the word “encomium,” and whose most sage advice to his writers was “try and make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” On hearing that his latest issue has one too many articles, many of which have run several thousand words overlength, Howitzer elects to cut none of it but to “shrink the masthead, pull some ads and buy more paper.” I’m certain I detected a distinct stiffening in the trouser region amongst the male cohort of the press corps in response to that fantasy scenario. Your correspondent’s nethers were likewise warmed. 

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The craft is, even by his exceptional standards, exceptional, from Mr. Alexandre Desplat‘s lovely musical compositions to Mr. Robert Yeoman‘s beautiful, often black and white, but often not photography, to the borderline heroic job done by the editor, Mr. Andrew Weisblum, who has taken all these pieces of assorted size and shape, plus the intertitles and animations and different moods and manic episodes, and somehow made the damn thing move like a whippet. And let’s not forget that, as have been most of Mr. Anderson’s recent works, “The French Dispatch” is positively exuberant with stars of the silver screen. The four main segments each feature their respective writer, so the cycling tour of Ennui’s seedy underbelly is led by Sazerac (Mr. Owen Wilson, also of Texas); the intriguing tale of an incarcerated painting prodigy (Mr. Benicio Del Toro) and his prison-officer muse (Mlle Léa Seydoux) is recounted by Berenson (Ms. Tilda Swinton of Great Britain); the account of a Paris ’68-style youth rebellion led by Zeffirelli B. (Master Timothée Chalamet) is both interpreted and interfered with, by the no-nonsense Krementz (Ms. Frances McDormand of Gibson City, Illinois); and the final chapter in which celebrity police chef Nescaffier (Mr. Stephen Park) is instrumental in rescuing the commissioner’s son from a kidnapping, is mellifluously related to a TV talk show host by food writer Roebuck Wright (Mr. Jeffrey Wright of Washington D.C.) 

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In the past, even this avowed enthusiast has found cause to ponder whether Mr. Anderson can sometimes lose the forest of actual feeling for the trees of whimsy. But, while admitting that “The French Dispatch” falls very squarely into my particular realm of fancy (I was once gifted a New Yorker subscription, and though I suspect it expired some time ago, they have never stopped sending them, ergo your correspondent’s apartment is now 38% magazine, with drifts of them gathering in the corners like snow), there are emotive moments here that are all the more moving for their unlikeliness. Mr. Wright, as played by Mr. Wright, is smitten with tears evoking memories of homosexual persecution; Nescaffier longingly describes the taste of the poison he heroically ingested as part of the rescue plan; Ms. McDormand’s Krementz has an exchange about the importance of accepting apologies that may be happening on the ramparts of a street-battle being partly decided by a chess match played via bullhorn, but that still contains a certain sad-eyed wisdom.  Even these characters of Mr. Anderson’s, whose outfits and accents are clipped and tailored so precisely you might imagine the same of their personalities, have souls that aspire to transcend the immaculate frames they occupy like gilded cages. Also, they are often very dumb and funny. 

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It will not connect for every viewer, dear reader, and it may not stay very long even with those who do climb aboard. Meanwhile, anyone previously unimpressed by Mr. Anderson’s peculiar sensibility should run a mile in the opposite direction, and then a mile further, from this extra-potent dose. “The French Dispatch” may genuinely cause them to wonder how anyone who lavishes such zealous attention on every square inch of a 20-ft high screen for every second of every one of its 107 minutes can possibly be quite right in the head. But in this magazine-assembly format, it seems to your humble correspondent that Mr. Anderson has found a close-to-ideal structure that flatters his mercurial, omnivorous tastes but also gets him out of any one storyline before its convolutions can convolute too much. Travel, art, food, politics, a loving obituary and of course more cinematic references than one could shake a rolled-up edition of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun at, reader, in signing off from the Riviera, I can only urge two things: that you make haste to this grand entertainment of Mr. Anderson’s, and that you believe, in honor of the late Mr. Howitzer, that I tried very hard to make it sound like I wrote it this way on purpose.  [A-]

“The French Dispatch” opens in the United States on October 22 via Searchlight Pictures.

Follow along with our full Cannes 2021 coverage here.