4/7/2023 0 Comments French dispatch![]() was less courteous with the rest of the magazine’s staff. One privately blind writer who wrote keenly through the eyes of others.įEMALE NARRATOR: The uncontested crackerjack of grammatical expertise.įamously gracious with his writers, Arthur Jr. One who never completed a single article, but haunted the halls cheerily for three decades. One reporter known as the best living writer in quality of sentences per minute. His writers line the spines of every good American library.īerensen, Sazerac, Krementz, Roebuck Wright. Why cast so many interesting actors just to smoosh them into the same wooden mold? This has been a bad habit of Anderson’s since Royal Tenenbaums-a film that plays practically like cinema vérité compared to his latter work.Arthur Howitzer, Jr., college freshman, eager to escape a bright future on the Great Plains, convinced his father, proprietor of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, to fund his transatlantic passage as an educational opportunity to learn the family business through the production of a series of travelogue columns to be published for local readers in the Sunday Picnic magazine.įEMALE NARRATOR: Over the next ten years, he assembled a team of the best expatriate journalists of his time and transformed Picnic into The French Dispatch, a factual weekly report on the subjects of world politics, the arts, high and low, fashion, fancy cuisine, fine drink, and diverse stories of human interests set in faraway quartiers. More and more in his films, Anderson demands a certain kind of performance-flat and yet affected-that neutralizes individual style. But most flounder as they try to make sense of Anderson’s pop-up book whimsy. Some actors, like McDormand, are able to maintain a sense of personality even as they’re swallowed up by the film’s adornment. What it’s all about is lost in the frenzied shuffle if it was ever about anything. There is a particularly lovely soliloquy about the comforts of food when one is far from home, a sentiment about travel and solitude that does seem to be actually saying something personal about Anderson’s experience as an immigrant.įor the most part, though, the stories are busy and incomprehensible, flurries of bells and whistles that really only serve to show us how much visual wit and linguistic acrobatics Anderson is capable of. There are a few moments of true meaning and poignancy to be found in each story, brief interludes when Anderson drops all the artisanal mugging and speaks more plainly. The third is a crime caper involving a police officer’s son and the professional chef who cooks for the gendarmerie. Another concerns a brash young radical and his vaguely defined cause. One is about a mentally ill murderer ( Benicio del Toro) who happens to be a brilliant artist. The film is divided into sections, with three separate stories taking up most of the space. It’s an odd tribute, one premised mostly on Anderson’s youthful imagination of these imperious literary lives instead of anything so complicated and grownup as humanity. Anderson turns his apparent heroes into bundles of quirk, making their work seem silly and mannered rather than probing. A James Baldwin stand-in ( Jeffrey Wright) is merely a loquacious dandy with no political context, and no sense of the shape of his own writing. A brittle reporter ( Frances McDormand) sleeps with her young subject ( Timothée Chalamet) for inexplicable reasons. His fascination with New Yorker writers of old-to whom he dedicates the film in a closing title card-leads him to similarly empty places. But The French Dispatch abuses that investment, insisting that we watch it preen and digress and advertise its creator’s smarts while giving us little to care about. Of course, we generally hope for a certainty of style from auteurs-the whole point of a Wes Anderson movie is that it’s a Wes Anderson movie. ![]() ![]() ![]() Where Anderson’s past elaborate worlds have invited us in with all their cozy detail, The French Dispatch’s seems to haughtily sniff in our direction it doesn’t much care if we get it. The film-structured as an issue of a New Yorker-esque magazine-is fussy, ornate, difficult to grasp onto. And then there’s Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, which isn’t about the filmmaker himself, but is intensely devoted to his personal fixations in a way that precludes outside engagement. This year’s Cannes has been filled with directorial self reflection: the memoir rumination of The Souvenir Part II, Mia Hansen-Løve’s meta mulling of her own craft in Bergman Island, Nadav Lapid’s similar filmmaker roman a clef in Ahed’s Knee. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |