French Dispatch Doesn't Translate Well

 

 

 

THE FRENCH DISPATCH OF LIBERTY, KANSAS EVENING SUN

Directed by Wes Anderson

Searchlight Pictures, 103 minutes, R (nudity, language, sexual references)

★★ ½

 

Wes Anderson drives me crazy. He made a nearly perfect film in Rushmore back in 1998, but he has been akin to a sloppy sophomore ever since. Nearly all of his films have absolutely brilliant ideas and sequences. The problem is that he stuffs his holiday birds with unappetizing innards.

 

After 30 minutes of The French Dispatch, I dared think, “At last! Wes Anderson has fulfilled his promise.” I should have left the theater a happy man instead of suffering through the following 73.  With this film, Anderson has officially replaced Quentin Tarantino as cinema’s reigning enfant terrible.

 

The setup is inspired. Bill Murray is Arthur Howitzer, Junior, the editor of a Kansas newspaper with an overseas office based in Ennui, France. (Pay attention to small details in the film, as many of them will induce guffaws.) The only lump in the pulp is that upon his death, the paper is to be closed and its assets sold. Murray is perfect in the role of a droll, world-weary publisher/editor who can be talked into just about any harebrained assignment as long as the writers stay within his word limit and endure his sharp editor’s pen.

 

The French Dispatch is not really a single movie; it’s a series of vignettes that use newspaper sections as a loose way of force fitting five sketches cohere. I’m not an Owen Wilson fan, but he’s a proper mix of insouciance and conman as Herbsaint Sazerac in “The Cycling Reporter.” His putative assignment is to contribute to the paper’s Travel section, but it’s just an excuse for him to ride his bike around the French countryside and go native. It was like an understated version of Michael Palin’s Monty Python cycling gag.

 

Anderson’s pièce de résistance is “The Concrete Masterpiece,” which takes place inside a prison for dangerous inmates. It falls under the Art section, where reporter J. K. L. Berenson (Tilda Swinton) recounts the rise of art world sensation Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio del Toro in an Oscar-nomination-worthy role). His abstract nudes have caught the art world’s attention, though there are a few flies on the easel. First, Moses is a murderous psychotic; second his model Simone (Léa Seydoux) is both a prison guard and the only person who Moses fears and obeys. Bob Balaban, Adrien Brody, and Henry Winkler also appear in this devastating takedown of art “professionals,” public taste, and gallery-owner greed.

 

Perhaps you already detect a potential problem. We’ve already met eight leading actors and numerous second bananas. Politics gets a workout in “Revisions and Manifesto,” covered by reporter Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand). I am one of McDormand’s biggest fans, but I’m not sure what in the name of spilt ink she is doing in this piece–perhaps attempting a Dorothy Parker/Martha Gellhorn/Joan Didion mashup. It appears as if Anderson intended a satire of France’s May '68 debacle, though the entire sequence is a mess and a dull one at that. Timothée Chalfont is Zeffirelli, a libidinous revolutionary who can definitely be bought and Lyné Khoudri is Juliette, who seems to be little more than a fiery waif with a head full of slogans and not much else.

 

This is followed by “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner” narrated and starring Jeffrey Wright as a food reporter. If you thought “Revisions and Manifesto” was boring, this vignette will have you staring at the calendar. More big names float in and out of an unappetizing look at Keystone Kops-like police whose gustatory talents outstrip their detective skills: Willem DaFoe, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, Liev Schreiber….

 

By the time we get back to Kansas for Howitizer’s demise and with it the folding of the paper, add appearances from others you might know–Griffin Dunne, Bruno Delbonnel, Elisabeth Moss, Jason Schwartzman–and toss in Anjelica Huston’s narration, we have run through 47 actors in billed roles and dozens more add-ins. Do the math and you’ll quickly surmise that almost everyone in the film should have been listed as having a cameo part. It’s too much and can only be accomplished via the cinematic equivalent of shoehorning. Anderson co-produced the film, but one wonders why the other two–Jeremy Dawson and Steven Rales–didn’t make Anderson flesh out the screenplay that he wrote, and give editor Andrew Weisblum marching orders to whip the film into an even consistency. But I suppose Anderson is now the poster boy for hipsters and the self-absorbed. It's all a pity, as this could have been a screaming triumph. Instead, two-thirds of it is a dull thud.

 

Rob Weir