The French Dispatch

THE FRENCH DISPATCH   **1/2

Wes Anderson

2021

IDEA:  A presentation of three stories from the fictional magazine the French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, on the occasion of its editor's passing.

BLURB:  Representing Wes Anderson at his most indulgently ostentations and overwrought, The French Dispatch hyperbolizes his style toward near-rococo abstraction. It dazzles and galls often at the same time, and does everything to reaffirm common criticisms of the director’s films as the preciously insular, politically dubious fetish objects of an obsessive aesthete. As in his recent output, Anderson again crafts an alternate-historical world only tenuously connected to reality, in which the chaotic forces of society are held in tension with his meticulously controlled, impregnable dollhouse universe. Bill Murray’s newspaper editor is thus something of a surrogate for the Andersonian superego, attempting to rein in and manicure the uncontainable excesses of reality. In The French Dispatch, these excesses are sublimated into one of the director’s most florid mise-en-scènes, a smorgasbord of ornate graphic layouts, tableaux vivant, breakaway sets, wandering subtitles, animation, and precision-timed sequence shots that overwhelms with its semiotic surplus. It’s awe-inspiring, but also fairly oppressive-feeling, especially in its tendency to smother the human component of a film bursting with famous faces. Also obscured by the foofaraw is history itself, most egregiously in the second story’s frustratingly glib gloss on the May 68 student protest movements. More than usual, even, Anderson seems unconcerned with the real world here, an odd attitude considering his intended homage to the colorful, firebrand, and sometimes unsavory personalities of journalists and artists who have made lasting marks on Western culture. The French Dispatch may in fact honor them, but in the end, it comes across more as a self-regarding kickshaw than an open love letter.