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The new dramedy anthology film from writer and director Wes Anderson, “The French Dispatch,” premieres on Friday. Two weekends ago, though, it showed at the New York Film Festival. “The French Dispatch” presents three different storylines from a fictional magazine under the same name. All of the stories shown throughout the film are based around the magazine’s supposedly final issue.

Each account brings us into the world of Ennui-sur-Blasé, an imaginary city based in France that’s undergoing extreme social, political and environmental change. As we see very little of Ennui-sur-Blasé and the contemporary adjustments mentioned above, the audience is rapidly transported into a world of journalistic stimulation.

Through the lens of cinematographer Robert Yeoman and the dazzling production design by Adam Stockhausen, “The French Dispatch’s” visual approach is carried out in ways only Wes Anderson and his team of creatives can successfully execute. While artistically stunning — perhaps the most beautiful-looking Wes Anderson film to date — “The French Dispatch” contains the same, traditional formulas that make his pictures distinct, but it creates a more frustrating and exhausting viewing experience than usual.

The stories told in “The French Dispatch” are the filmmaker’s love letters to journalism, along with a breathable commentary on journalists’ attempts to present the world through typed expression.

Its premises and characters are based on various prominent figures in the origin of The New Yorker magazine. The main editor of the French Dispatch publication is Arthur Howitzer Jr., played by Bill Murray, and based on none other than New Yorker co-founder and editor-in-chief Harold Ross. One story is based on the infamous May 1968 student occupation protests, another inspired by art dealer Lord Duveen, while Jeffrey Wright’s character, Roebuck Wright, is adapted from the writings and personal characteristics of A.J. Liebling and James Baldwin.

Each anecdote in the film delivers the usual quirkiness that thrives in Anderson’s pictures, and the technical bliss that comes off as incredibly ambitious and wonderfully dizzy: varying aspect ratio change, abrupt animated sequences and glorious set pieces at an Anderson-y peak. There’s a scene in which you have to look at one half of the screen, while you listen to a narration describe what’s on the other half of the screen, while having to read subtitles from another scene occurring in a little tiny corner of the screen — as if Anderson is forcing you to come back to this movie multiple times for this scene alone.

But the film is so Wes Anderson that it feels like the ultimate parody of his entire filmography, and not in all the positive lights that shone on his earlier body of work.

Most of Anderson’s previously-told criticisms were on the artificiality of his characters, in terms of a lack of true attachment, emotion or relatability. The emotional identities of Anderson’s new characters — played by a conglomerate of an ensemble cast including Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Benicio del Toro and many more — contain the exact same forms of criticisms, artificiality in its prime.

This inevitable phrase, “style over substance,” that critique of “The French Dispatch” invokes hasn’t been an issue over his last nine features, films that exceptionally mix the two, such as “Bottle Rocket,” “Rushmore” or “The Royal Tenenbaums.” As the director gradually discovered his new production methods, as well as the addition of co-writer Roman Coppola instead of frequent collaborator Owen Wilson, the whimsical energies of his last few pictures have never been so obvious and singular.

Compared to 2014’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” — a masterclass of bringing together both visual and thematic elements that make the film as incredible as it is — “The French Dispatch” is an overflow of Wes Anderson tropes that’s ultimately deemed disappointing and woozy. It goes to show the filmmaker’s technical brilliance but is a dissatisfying section of the filmmaker’s routine.

Published on October 20, 2021 at 11:44 pm