The French Dispatch is a cinematic magazine a la The New Yorker, broken up into vignette "articles". Each one with a different topic, story, and title card. The film is framed as the last issue and contains all of the typical artistic meticulousness people have come to expect from writer/director Wes Anderson.
No surprise coming from Anderson, the ensemble cast is large and stacked with talent, to the point about a third of the famous actors on the bill have virtually nothing to do. They all fair well, an Anderson picture virtually never fails, almost all just kind of show up, get into the fast-talking somewhat monotone Anderson vernacular and that's it. Which is successful to a point. But the the thing Anderson struggles with, particularly in his post-Tenebaums phase is pathos. The film looks beautiful, it's precisely, complicatedly constructed, the dialogue is tight but it struggles for real human emotion. The two stand outs who are able to meet the Anderson patois but then go beyond are Adrian Brody in a large comedic, almost Wil-E-Coyote cartoon performance, and Jeffrey Wright in a funny, authoritative but deeply melancholic turn. Wright particularly is astounding. And his performance, by comparison, shows what the other actors aren't doing.
Production all around from set to costumes to score, no surprise- perfect, pristine. But it seems in recent years Anderson is relying more on his production design rather than his actors, which is certainly a choice, and it works well enough, but taking time and focus away from the actors has a result of the director or his film somewhat losing focus of humanity and that's a problem. It seems, perhaps, that he's using ensemble casts with a gross of famous names to compensate for this but it only shores up this oversight but so much.
A gorgeous puzzle box of a movie with a dominating turn from Wright but somewhat too calculating and twee.
Currently available for rent on most VOD platforms.
Rent It.
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