By Tom Jozwik
“The French Dispatch,” opening Oct. 29, is nothing if not inventive. Wes Anderson ‘s (“The Grand Budapest Hotel,” “Moonrise Kingdom”) latest film blends comedy with drama, color with black and white footage, cartoons with live action, stage techniques with cinematic ones.
With its death of a newspaper executive framework and a body consisting of stories compiled by associates of the deceased, “Dispatch” evokes “Citizen Kane,” the inventive motion picture par excellence.
Ask any film scholar—Orson Welles’ 1941 presumed take on the life of William Randolph Hearst is a true work of art. Could Anderson’s movie be a work of art as well? Perhaps, but works of art can be dense and not especially entertaining. Melville’s novel “Moby Dick” is one case in point. “Dispatch” might be another.
Some film professionals have suggested “Dispatch” should be viewed more than once. Time is valuable, however, and movie tickets can be expensive. While, at the preview screening I attended, a number of folks at applauded as if they’d be happy to watch the film once more, a single “Dispatch” viewing sufficed for me (although I’d rather see the movie a second time than attempt to wade through “Moby Dick” again). I found a good deal of the film to be … well, dense and not especially entertaining.
Anderson’s inventive film, set in a fictional French city in 1975, concludes inventively—with an homage to the New Yorker (on which the movie’s magazine appears to be based) in the forms of an onscreen list of star New Yorker contributors (humorist James Thurber is one) and a series of cartoonish New Yorker-like covers. I liked that.
I was impressed that Anderson was able to assemble a cast laden with name actors, several of them in cameo roles, and I particularly appreciated the measured performances of principals Bill Murray as the magazine’s quirky expatriate editor seen primarily in flashback; Frances McDormand as one of his quirky expatriate writers; Timothee Chalamet as the student revolutionary McDormand’s character writes about—and falls for, despite her repeated spouting of the phrase “journalistic neutrality”; and Benicio Del Toro as a tortured artist profiled in another “Dispatch” article (“story,” in journalistic jargon).
I give writer-director Anderson an A for effort in the making of “The French Dispatch.” But I do believe a simpler, more linear approach would’ve made for a more palatable production.
The R-rated film runs for 1:47.