Wes Anderson’s anthology is the handsomest thing he has made and the least sure of why we should care. One of its three stories works, one half works, and one has us checking the clock. Jeffrey Wright saves the last quarter of an hour.
Wes Anderson has made a magazine. Not a film about one, though it is that too, but a magazine: a cover, a travel column, three long features and an obituary, assembled as the final issue of The French Dispatch, the Kansas newspaper supplement that Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray) edited from a French town called Ennui-sur-Blasé until he died at his desk. It is 108 minutes long, and nearly every one of them is beautiful. Whether you will want to read past the pictures depends on which of the three stories you are in.
The craft is not in question. Robert Yeoman shoots most of the film in black and white and cuts to colour for a few seconds at a time, when a canvas is unveiled or a plate is set down, so that colour becomes a thing the film does to you rather than a thing it simply has. The frame narrows and widens as the stories demand. Adam Stockhausen builds the town in cross-section, a police station opened up like a doll’s house with the front wall taken off, a prison that is all corridor. Milena Canonero puts the prison guard in a uniform starched to attention and the students in tweed jackets that look inherited. Alexandre Desplat’s score is spare, mostly piano, and does not fight the images.
The first feature is the sturdiest. Tilda Swinton’s J.K.L. Berensen delivers it as a lecture, slides and all, and Swinton’s plummy hesitations are funnier than most of the written jokes. Benicio del Toro plays the painter Moses Rosenthaler almost entirely in grunts, Léa Seydoux gives his guard and model Simone a stillness the film badly needs, and Adrien Brody, as the dealer Julian Cadazio, talks about art the way other men talk about horses. The story has one idea, that money arrives to spoil a thing before the thing is finished, and it keeps finding new ways to say it. It ends before it wears thin.
The second does not. Frances McDormand’s Lucinda Krementz is a journalist who has decided to keep her distance from a student revolt and then does not, and Timothée Chalamet’s Zeffirelli and Lyna Khoudri’s Juliette are the students. The film is not interested in what they want, and neither, as far as we could tell, are they. Around this point we felt our attention drift off the people and on to the furniture, which is where Anderson seems to want it. McDormand does what she can with a woman who is mostly a typewriter. Chalamet has the hair and the cigarette and not much else.
Then Jeffrey Wright arrives and the film finds its pulse. His Roebuck Wright is a food critic on a television chat show, reciting a profile of Nescaffier (Steve Park), the police chef who cooks for the Commissaire (Mathieu Amalric), and the joke, delivered without a wink, is that he remembers every word he has ever written. Wright plays the man’s loneliness underneath the elocution, and the segment is the only one in which somebody’s insides matter more than the set. It moved us more than we thought this film had in it. There is an exchange near its end, between two men who have each come a long way to be here, that we will not quote, and it is the reason to sit through the middle.
Andrew Weisblum cuts the whole thing fast, stories inside stories, a freeze frame every time a character is introduced, an animated chase when the live action will not do. The speed is the trouble as much as the design is. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) had one story and a grief running under it, and gave both room. Rushmore (1998) had one boy. This has three features and an editor, and the affection goes to the magazine, the mastheads and the house style and the sign on the wall forbidding crying, rather than to the people who wrote for it. We admired the pages more than we read them.
See it, if you like him, and see it at home, where you can stop the picture and read the headlines Stockhausen has painted on the shop fronts. Skip nothing in the last twenty minutes. It runs 108 minutes and carries a 15 certificate, mostly for a nude painter’s model and some cheerful violence in the kitchen.
