Although one can only marvel, gape-jawed, at the feverish, coordinated complexity of set and backdrop movement, carefully composed and choreographed actor placement, traveling camerawork and integrated miniatures — relentlessly, as this aggressively bizarre film proceeds — all this visual razzmatazz rapidly wears out its welcome.
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| Magazine editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray, left) listens while star journalist Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright, right) defends his turn of phrase; both are ignored by another staffer who serves more as background decoration, given that he never has written a word. |
There’s never been any doubt that Wes Anderson, as a filmmaker, is obsessed with eccentricity and kitsch; his cinematic visions generally occupy a universe several steps beyond traditionally heightened reality. When he succeeds, the result can be a bravura work of genius, as with The Grand Budapest Hotel.
When he slides off the rails, as with this one, we’re left with nothing but contrived and relentlessly mannered weirdness for its own sake. Which doesn’t work.
Worse yet, despite all the marvelous eye candy, this film is boring. Crushingly boring.
It looks like half of Hollywood wanders through this self-indulgent vanity project, sometimes for no more than a minute or so. You could spend the entire film just trying to identify everybody (and, at times, that’s more interesting than trying to follow the outré storytelling).
In fairness, the premise and narrative gimmick are delectable. In a setting that seems 1950s-ish, The French Dispatch is a widely circulated American magazine based in the French city of Ennui-sur-Blasé, lovingly overseen by quietly cranky, Kansas-born editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray).
If Anderson’s vision begins to feel like a love letter to the venerable New Yorker magazine, during its 1950s and ’60s heyday, well … that’s undoubtedly intentional.
As the film begins, Howitzer has just died. The staff journalists — hand-picked over the years, sometimes less for their writing chops, and more for the way they lend atmosphere to the voluminous offices — assemble to draft his obituary, and prepare the magazine’s final issue. We then watch the three primary feature stories crafted, over time, by writers who embedded themselves, and became part of their assignments.
The generous application of flashbacks allows Murray plenty of screen time, as he fine-tunes each piece. His traditional advice, to each scribe: “Try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” (You’ve gotta love that line.)
We open with a brief travelogue, as Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), the “Cycling Reporter,” takes us on a guided tour of Ennui-sur-Blasé: along the way relating the city’s history, while proudly highlighting many of the seedier neighborhoods, and their often wacky inhabitants.
This entertaining sequence showcases the astonishing work by production designer Adam Stockhausen, supervising art director Stéphane Cressend and cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman, who (I hope) was paid by the mile, because he must’ve been run off his feet.
A few “pages” later, we settle into the first feature piece: “The Concrete Masterpiece,” about a criminally insane painter (Benicio Del Toro, as Moses Rosenthaler), his guard and muse (Léa Seydoux, as Simone), and the ravenous dealers hoping to make a fortune by transforming this guy into an art world sensation (Adrien Brody, Bob Balaban and Henry Winkler).
Rosenthaler’s artistic evolution is, at least initially, amusingly arch; it’s easy to understand why a homicidal maniac might be tempted to paint, when presented with such a fetching subject who’s willing to pose — for hours on end, in impressively contorted positions — in the nude.
Alas, the overly stilted manner of interaction soon wears thin.
These characters don’t converse in a traditional manner; they declaim, as if each line erupts from a Shakespearean monologue, often looking at the camera — which is to say, us — rather than each other. All line deliveries are the same: cold, clipped and rapidly spoken, no matter how tongue-twisting the sentence, without a flicker of emotion or reaction from bland, stoic expressions.
This continues throughout the entire film. It’s impossible to discuss acting; there isn’t any. We soon get a sense that every single bit of dialogue exists primarily as an acting exercise: “Say the line, and don’t crack a smile!”
It gets old.
Yes, the scripters — Anderson, Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinness and Jason Schwartzman — clearly had a good time poking fun at stuffy, pretentious “art people” who’d claim that spaghetti thrown against a wall is a masterpiece. (Sadly, I suspect that’s been done.) But that isn’t enough to sustain a fable that runs roughly 45 minutes.
Journalist No. 2 — Frances McDormand, as Lucinda Krementz — then narrates “Revisions to a Manifesto,” an incomprehensibly chaotic chronicle of love and death on the barricades, at the height of student revolt. (Les Misérables, this ain’t.) Lucinda compromises her journalistic distance by getting involved with the star-crossed leaders of the movement: the youthfully idealistic Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet) and the hard-nosed Juliette (Lyna Khoudri).
Finally, refined food journalist Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) — possessed of a “typographic memory,” meaning he can recall every word he ever wrote — recounts the details of “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner,” while being interviewed by a TV talk show host (Liev Schreiber).
This begins as a portrait of legendary chef Nescaffier (Stephen Park), who serves at the pleasure of Ennui-sur-Blasé’s Police Commissioner (Mathieu Amalric). The chronicle abruptly takes a savage left turn when the commissioner’s beloved son (Winsen Ait Hellal) is kidnapped by a gang of thugs led by “The Chauffeur” (Edward Norton), who threatens to kill the boy unless the syndicate’s recently arrested accountant (Willem Dafoe) is released.
This segment allows Anderson to indulge in his fondness for animation, during a climactic chase through the city … but, sadly, this stylistic quirk doesn’t work nearly as well as the ski pursuit finale in Grand Budapest Hotel.
Honestly, that’s just the dumb, distracting, throw-up-your-arms-in-resignation capper of a tediously contrived cinematic exercise that long ago circled the bottom of the drain.
Memo to Wes: A little bit of “cute” — and “precious,” and “exaggerated,” and “pretentious” — goes a long way.
This is a perfect review of the most confusing,tedious, pretentious movie I've ever seen. I could barely understand how one sentence led to the next. Thank you Derrick!
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