The French Dispatch: why that movie everyone likes sucks

I was thinking of writing something about my reaction to The French Dispatch right after I saw it a few weeks ago but then stopped thinking about it for awhile until various publications and sites started doing their best films of the year lists etc. in the last couple weeks. The film’s in my opinion absurd inclusion on almost all prominent “best of” lists, and in fact in the top spot of several, got me thinking again about what annoyed me about it and why my opinion was so anti-consensus on this one.

Of course on one level it shouldn’t be remotely surprising that the latest Wes Anderson film, a film that’s conceived of as a tribute to The New Yorker magazine in its heyday, would be something a lot of movie critic types who write for big magazines would like. In fact The New Yorker itself found it irresistible to award Dispatch the top spot on its own “best of” list, leading to many on twitter posting the Obama gives himself a medal GIF. Besides this obvious case of conflict of interest more broadly virtually all professional film critics (to the extent that such people exist today) love Wes Anderson and if they don’t love Anderson they certainly love portrayals of the mid-century magazine/literary world where a writer could keep themselves going and get tons of prestige for filing maybe one or two pieces a year. Simply put you almost couldn’t come up with a film more perfectly engineered for the year end best of lists.

I myself have always had a love hate relationship with Anderson’s work. I’m not a professional (nor even an amateur) film writer but I’ve seen virtually all of this films in the theater without even really seeking them out. That is to say for me he’s one of the few remaining directors of wide release films who has a certain stamp or sensibility that’s always there and keeps me coming back, if sometimes just barely. The trouble is the certain stamp lies almost entirely with the visual and stylistic aspect of his films. Set Dressing, Art Direction, mise en scene, whatever you want to call it, these aspects of Anderson’s film are never less than an impeccable, and are often even more than that. The trouble is it’s hit or miss whether all of this visual beauty is matched with any true emotional depth or with resonant characters or engaging narratives and I’d put the miss to hit ratio far higher than most professional reviewers do.

The one time everything came together perfectly for me was in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) which I believe to be Anderson’s masterpiece, the one time that his elaborate art direction was matched to a story that had real emotional weight and depth. This was also the most recent live action film that Anderson has done. While Hotel had the usual beautiful/stylistic touches there was an underlying emotional resonance to it, the feeling of being on the verge of some terrible cataclysms (the film’s version of Nazi domination of Europe) but life still needing to go on.

Unfortunately there’s no such underlying emotional anchor like that in Dispatch. (SPOILER ALERT for months old film based loosely on decades old events) First of all the film is oddly structured, even by Anderson standards, though I suppose there’s no straightforward way to turn a magazine into a movie. While the promotional campaign for it made it seem like the film would follow a ragtag bunch through the process of putting together a New Yorker like magazine in fact it’s an anthology film (something Anderson’s never done before) of three films based on three articles in the fictional magazine with very little time spent on the framing device.

Speaking of the framing device the whole connection of the world depicted in the film to the actual New Yorker is so stylized and removed and cartoonish that it seems pathetic that real New Yorker people are so enamored of it. The magazine called the “French Dispatch” is not even a magazine at all but is instead a supplement to a newspaper in Kansas, where Anderson is from. And since it’s the French Dispatch all of the stories take place in France. It’s The New Yorker without New York. And if this wasn’t cloying and Wes Andersonesque enough the city everyone is in isn’t Paris but is called “Ennui en blasé” a truly juvenile and cringe worthy level of wordplay but typical of Anderson’s use of French throughout the film.

The first of the three parts is the best, strangest, and not coincidentally in my opinion, the only one that doesn’t feature a character loosely based on a famous historic New Yorker author. Instead it’s based, extremely loosely, on a a six part profile of a modern art dealer named Lord Duveen, which ran in The New Yorker in 1951. This character is played by Adrien Brody but this third of the film is really about a brilliant artist who’s also a violent criminal played by Benicio del Toro and a prison guard who serves as his model/muse played by Léa Seydoux (who I believe is the only native French speaker in this whole “French” movie). The fact that the inspiration for this section is something so relatively obscure I think frees to be it’s own thing and avoid distracting comparisons to any real world inspiration.

This brings us to the second installment which is where things really go off the rails. The subject of this section is the French student movement protests of 1968 and the way it treats these events should be crazy making to anyone with even the smallest amount of respect of for leftism, for history, for students, for young people, and for journalism, among a whole bunch of other things. Apparently it’s based on the work of a real New Yorker writer named Mavis Gallant here analogized as Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand). Now I have no idea what Gallant’s actual work was like and how she behaved in Paris in 1968, but if the depiction is remotely accurate her behavior around the student movement was appalling and if it isn’t accurate then her estate probably has ample grounds to sue or at least to be really pissed off. Essentially “Miss Krementz” as the character is called by everyone is in a sexual relationship with a charismatic leader of the protest movement, known only as “Zeffirelli” and played by Timothee Chalamet. Chalamet in this movie is another typical Wes Anderson triumph of casting, costuming, and makeup. He looks the part just perfectly and one can easily see why he’d become a figurehead of the movement just from the visual alone. Zeffirelli’s parents have no issue with him sleeping with Miss Krementz and it’s an open and accepted secret among most of his comrades. And God knows the last thing I want to do is get into “age gap discourse” but it’s a strange choice particularly when you see how the characters look in the film. Frances McDormand, as always, is aggressively non-styled to look exactly her real age, which is 64. Chalemet is 25 in reality but the character of Zeffirelli is clearly meant to be no more than 15 or 16. So what we’re seeing portrayed is a woman who is (very generously) in late middle aged having an ongoing sexual relationship with someone who’s about the age of most of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. What’s more Krementz constantly abuses the power imbalance of the relationship and her journalistic ethics by undermining and criticizing Zeffirelli’s leadership of the movement and worst of all surreptitiously editing and rewriting a manifesto for the movement written by Zeffirelli’s girlfriend, making it more liberal and centrist. In the final confrontation between Zeffirelli and Krementz she says the students should know everyone’s on the same side and adds with great emphasis “including the riot police.”

If this didn’t leave a bad enough taste in your mouth the final, most elaborate, installment of the film is sure to. For some reason here Anderson thinks it’s a smart idea to combine two of the most widely known writers connected to The New Yorker, A.J. Liebling and James Baldwin, into one character: Roebuck Wright, played by Jeffrey Wright. This composite character, who isn’t really recognizable as either writer except in the most superficial ways, then goes on a madcap adventure more like the kinds of things that happened in Anderson’s earlier films but also in his more recent animated films (in fact the film switches to animation at various points). The story is complete nonsense. It begins with Roebuck Wright, who apparently like Liebling but unlike Baldwin writes about food, going to a special private dinner with the Police Chief of Ennui, who in another groan inducing grade school French reference is named Escoffier. The police chief has an Asian private chef who barely gets any lines. The dinner is interrupted because the Chief’s son is kidnapped which leads to a madcap chase around the city which leads to the chef acting heroically and the son being recovered. And then some minor moral is tacked onto it about how both the chef and Wright are immigrants to France so feel like they have to do better or something.

So, it doesn’t take much to note that there’s an odd through line of veneration of police and prisons throughout this movie. The first third is about a beautiful prison guard who helps an artistic genius. The second part seems to take the side of the police crushing a popular rebellion and includes jokes about tear gas. And the third part is about how a chief of police is a genius and a gourmand. I know it’s controversial to some whether movies should be judged according to how they respond to real world around them but I find it quite fascinating, and not in a good way, that after a year of possibly the most sustained and largest protests against police and policing in US history that this is what Anderson chose to make a film about, that this is what was on his mind.

The French Dispatch is an oddly ugly mean-spirited movie. I haven’t seen nearly enough new release feature films in 2021 to know what the best film was, The French Dispatch wasn’t even the best of the few I did see..