![]() ![]() And genius, the film argues, can crop up in unlikely places: in an asylum for the criminally insane in the kitchen of a police commissioner in a youth movement being taken for granted by elders who can’t see the passion underlying the fractured, warring, romantic idealism. Four writers, four stories, each overstuffed with a gallery of (in the usual Anderson style) eccentric, emotional personalities. More than just an anthology, The French Dispatch is a nesting-egg of a movie, one that treats the people therein - not only the writers and editors, but the subjects who’ve inspired their articles - with the same dedication and gleaming awe as Anderson gave that sushi chef and those prison escapees. That’s why he convinced his father, owner of the Liberty Kansas Evening Sun, to afford him this little outpost, this collective of quirky artist-journalists and the odd stories they’re prone to tell. It is, like the settings of most of Anderson’s movies, a place that mixes the real with the just-short-of-real, too perfect not to feel manufactured on a soundstage, yet so rife with histories and personalities, stories and idiosyncratic details, it can’t feel entirely fake.Ī great place to be a magazine writer, in other words - as the French Dispatch‘s editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr. Anderson, who per usual wrote the script, unfolds the film article by article - starting with front-of-book local color by way of a bike tour through the magazine’s headquarters of Ennui-sur-Blasé, France, a place where altar boys wreak havoc on the elderly for laughs and an average of 8.25 bodies per year gets fished out of the local river. ![]() It is a magazine in movie form, taking its title from the fictional French Dispatch, a Sunday supplement to the also-fictional Liberty Kansas Evening Sun. Yet it pays similar tribute to the ingenuity and style that have defined Anderson’s previous features. ![]() The French Dispatch, the director’s tenth feature, differs for being an anthology film - four stories for the price of one. And you watch to see what contraption of a world the equally clever Anderson has invented to capture them doing it. Better to let it play like a Rube Goldberg machine: You watch to see how they did it. The escape is too cheekily conceived for triumph not to feel like a foregone conclusion. The Grand Budapest Hotel gave us a prison break so clever that it’s almost more memorable for the crafty resourcefulness at play than for the suspense of the scene. In Isle of Dogs, a scene of sushi being prepared renders the practice into an art form and the chef, hands nimbler than a heart surgeon’s, into an artist. It is, for me, one of their better qualities. This, as much as his well-documented stylistic habits (the tragicomic romanticism and nostalgia, the fantastical insistence on visual balance and emotionally coded-color schemes) is what has defined his movies. Anderson has always displayed affection for great craft - and for the artist-geniuses responsible for that craft, including the collaborators who’ve made his cosmetically pristine, well-coiffed cinematic style possible over the years. Nevertheless, The French Dispatch feels inevitable.īut thankfully not in the obvious ways. He is also a director known for geeking out over his appetites, obsessions, and taste in his movies - even if the man himself is too well groomed for the phrase “geeking out” to feel appropriately tailored to the man. ![]() Berkeley for $600 and who even, for a while, paid to have his new issues bound for preservation. This is a man who fell in love with The New Yorker in the 11th grade who once bought a bound set of forty years’ worth of the magazine from U.C. They’ll tell you that Wes Anderson’s new movie, The French Dispatch, is a love letter to The New Yorker magazine. ![]()
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