Wes Anderson is in some ways the king of aesthetic, crisp camp, but this messy anthology fails to move forward the genre and repeats some of the weird misfires of its predecessors. None of the stories is able to propel the plot for very long and they remain fairly isolated from one another without a common thread besides the aesthetic that the director is best known for. The longest episodes like Timothee Chalamet’s parody of French student protests drags and also suffers from some exceptionally weird choices. Anderson seems distracted in this one.
Writing with the advantage or disadvantage of time (this movie came out in October of last year, I saw it in January, it’s half way through February), it’s clear that French Dispatch was never going to win any awards. It’s an odd episodic collection featuring the old staples of Wes Anderson’s movies, both his actors and his fixation and odd detachment from the female characters he writes. Even in the promotional material for this movie above you can see the naked form of the prison guard and muse (played by the ethereal and comic Lea Seydoux) to her incarcerated artist savant (Benicio del Toro). It’s one of those truly bizarre directorial choices that seems to read as intended to be playful but actually feels exploitative. Saoirse Ronan’s minute and a half of screentime is hard to watch, especially when it’s clear that she is being so thoroughly underutilized.
The indefatigable Jeffrey Wright plays an oddball detective novelist with a eidetic memory for his own prose in a caper about police department cuisine that’s imaginative and fast-paced. The only problem is that it doesn’t have enough meat to propel a full-length movie and comes off more as a really good pilot for television. That and the weird throwaway jokey(?) line about being gay and how it affects his sense of direction. A lot of the script is meant to flow over you, waft past you with the vapors of a beautifully crafted word salad. There were many moments in Tilda Swinton’s exposition that I burst out laughing as she plows through some truly insane dialogue, but again, there are moments that fall flat and taste stale like her character’s admission to being sexually assaulted by Benicio del Toro’s character.
In the French student protest plot, Timothee Chalamet’s sexual relationship with the reporter played by Francis McDormand is explicitly played for the age gap gag, and though it’s not crude or explicit, the contrast with Chalamet’s young girlfriend, the lack of journalistic scruples, everything seems a little… predatory? I wonder if I would feel the same if it were an older man? This is a movie for completionists and completionists will no doubt place this one at the bottom of whatever tidy list of Anderson movies they have seen is.
