People are getting tired of Wes Anderson. In fact, they have been for some time. The knock on him, which has permeated in some way nearly every critical meditation on the recently released The French Dispatch, had already crystalized by at least 2005, when Anthony Lane of The New Yorker wrote:
“We have grown accustomed to the unassailable claims of deadpan, although Anderson’s detractors might argue that underreaction, having begun as a show of hipness, has now frozen into a mannerism. What chance remains, they would ask, for the venting of genuine feeling? What would it take to harry these controlled characters into grief, or the silliness of bliss, or unconsidered rage?
Lane believes that Anderson’s signature style, whatever its merits, suffers from a stifling drawback: it limits the emotion that can be depicted onscreen. He also implies, rather insidiously, that this limitation reflects a deficiency in Anderson himself: that the filmmaker’s style is a result of his valuing “hipness” over authenticity.
This view, as I said, has now become close to dogma for professional critics, most of whom profess to enjoy The French Dispatch—perhaps suspecting its artistic significance—while having mostly negative things to say about it. Richard Roeper of The Chicago-Sun Times exemplifies the general reception:
“It’s as if we’re in a museum of modern art and we’re silently applauding the latest exhibit, but our tear ducts remain desert-dry.”
Notwithstanding the melodrama of “desert-dry,” Roeper’s—and by easy extension, the critical establishment’s—evaluation of The French Dispatch is plainly off the mark. As the passing of time will surely solidify, this movie is very possibly the best film in the oeuvre of one of the very best filmmakers in all of American cinema.
One theater viewing is not nearly enough to synthesize and delineate the tremendous amount of imagery and wit saturating The French Dispatch. Perhaps once I have the pause button (always a godsend for an Anderson film) at my disposal, I’ll give that project a try. But it’s clear to me that first and foremost, the film is a tribute to being human: to our fallibilities, quirks, and desperations. It takes the form of a compendium of three magazine stories, but the events of the stories themselves, as well as the theme of journalism, are red herrings for anyone looking to make sense of the film.
That’s because we actually learn very little about modern art, culture, politics, cooking, or even magazines from the stories on display. What we do learn about are the characters who tell (write) these stories, all of whom I found funny and lovable, and some of whom I found painfully touching in their offbeat plights—in total contradiction to Anderson’s supposed indifference to human emotion.
This is where the Lanes and Roepers of the world have Anderson completely wrong. What Lane fairly describes as Anderson’s characters’ “underreaction” doesn’t equate to lack of feeling. It only requires that we supply more of what Anderson has deliberately left out to get the catharsis he’s luring us toward. In The French Dispatch, a lonely college professor (Frances McDormand) has an affair with one of her students (Timothee Chalamet), but later encourages him to get a room with his rival revolutionary. At the episode’s conclusion, she stoically types the story in an empty, blank room, her back to the camera. It’s filmed, like everything, in a quick-cutting, whimsical tone—but if your tear ducts are “desert-dry” here, you may not be thinking enough about what you’ve seen.
But what’s Anderson’s larger statement with this new film? You surely don’t need to plumb those depths to enjoy it, but I can’t help myself, so here I go.
The death of Arthur Howitzer (Bill Murray) at the movie’s beginning signifies a cultural change. The character’s most emphasized trait is the freedom he allows his writers, who, we soon begin to learn, have used this freedom liberally to spin wild yarns that indulge their own interests and weirdnesses at the expense of conveying reliable, factual information. Howitzer’s death, then, seems to hint at the demise of a certain kind of artistic liberty, or at least an imminent shift in priorities from style and character to realism and straight reporting. But with Howitzer dead, it seems, stylistic flourish may have lost its champion. Without him, journalism is likely to be shorter, drier, and more accurate. And indeed, the types of stories we see in this film are not exactly the norm in today’s magazines.
Howitzer’s death is placed in 1975, when Anderson was six years old. Surely the auteur is idealizing an older era when, he believes, a writer might have been rewarded for exploring human eccentricities rather than heckled for deviating from realism, as he himself has been upon nearly all of his major releases, including this one. After all, Howitzer’s credo is: “Make it seem like you wrote it that way on purpose,” which could surely double as Anderson’s own standard: surely no one would doubt The French Dispatch as an intentional, deliberate creation.
But perhaps Anderson views himself not as a casualty of changing values—as the magazine’s writers are sadly about to be—but rather the successor of his beloved Howitzer. The film ends with the line, “What next?” What, indeed? Well, the Dispatch might be defunct…but if only there was another, newer medium, where a burgeoning artist might pick up where Howitzer left off and produce work that seems to be made “on purpose”! If only!
–Jim Andersen
For more movie reviews, check out my review of Drive My Car.