Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The French Dispatch’ on Hulu, in Which Wes Anderson Further Perfects His Wonderful Peculiarities

The French Dispatch – now on Hulu – is Wes Anderson’s new fanciful flight of fancy, a work that, par for the filmmaker’s course, all but demands anyone discussing it to use the word “fancy” as a noun. Also, the words “drollery,” “whimsical,” “melancholic” and “dryyyyyy.” And “twee.” Mustn’t forget “twee.” Anderson’s movies are many things, but above all that, they are “twee.” With that out of the way, we can get on with the business of assessing the film, which was delayed for a year-and-a-half thanks to the Covid pandemic, and embiggened with enough star power to warm a solar system: This is where I’d say it stars Tilda Swinton and none of the rest matter, but it also stars Frances McDormand and Bill Murray, so such a statement would be far too incorrigible. When the story is not set in Liberty, Kansas, a real city, it’s set in Ennui-sur-Blasé, France, a fake city, and despite that, it’s never, ever boring.

THE FRENCH DISPATCH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: To kind of give away one of the movie’s many, many punchlines, The French Dispatch is a magazine, “a largely unread Sunday supplement of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun.” And yet it has an apparently massive budget, possibly because this film is ridiculous and does not at all reflect reality in the slightest, except when it does, at least emotionally, or because it’s set in 1975, when journalism had actual value. The Dispatch is a satellite bureau reporting all the crucial stories from Ennui, France for everyone in America’s heartland. Editor Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Murray) has died, and the Dispatch will go with him. It’s a shame. He employed good writers – “they were his people” – and we’re about to meet three of them, as they share perhaps the finest and most poignant stories of their careers.

First is J.K.L. Berensen, played by Swinton as if she were at least 40 percent upper-jaw. (She just sounds like she has more teeth than sense.) Lecturing in front of an audience, she tells the story of Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro), a master artist who also happens to be a psychotic and suicidal committer of homicide. He’s been in prison for 10 years, with 40 more to go. We meet him as he studies the nude form of Simone (Lea Seydoux), a prison guard with whom he’s having a love affair. His painting looks nothing like naked Simone. It’s abstract. It’s also a masterpiece, if you believe fellow inmate Julian Cadazio (Adrien Brody), an art dealer who wants to buy the painting. Moses says it’ll cost 50, no, 75 cigarettes, but Julian gives him 250,000 francs instead. Julian gets out, turns Moses into the art world’s great hyped hope, and waits as the tortured painter uses Simone as his muse and tries to get over his exquisite inner pain in order to create his next grand work. THREE YEARS LATER, reads a subtitle, and the words have barely faded from the screen as Julian exclaims, “It’s three years later!”, and we all laugh, because maybe we’re amused by such things, and/or by Julian’s exasperation, and the anticipation he carries for the unveiling of Moses’ new painting.

Part deux is a piece from the section of the Dispatch called “Politics/Poetry,” which might explain why almost nobody reads the magazine. Writer Lucinda Krementz (McDormand) no-nos journalistically while covering a student revolution in Ennui – something about boys wanting access to the girls’ dormitory. Lucinda ends up in bed with the movement’s wiry and impassioned leader, Zeffirelli (Timothee Chalamet). He types away at a manifesto, and she edits it and contributes an appendix. Do the math, and the romance is creepy, but this is France, remember. Anyway, there’s a couple throwaway lines about the impossibility of journalistic neutrality deployed as excuses, and after a bit she pushes the boy towards fellow revolter Juliette (Lyna Khoudri). The fate of the revolution, and Zeffirelli, will dictate whether Lucinda’s piece is a hard news or human interest story, but I won’t reveal which.

Finally, Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) not only writes about cuisine, but remembers every word he ever wrote, and in what order, which he does for a television interview, orating his piece about Lt. Nescaffier (Steve Park), a chef who makes impossibly exquisite meals for the Ennui police force. You’d think the story would involve sorry sangwiches and stale donuts, but no, it’s more about how the Commissaire’s (Mathieu Amalric) son was kidnapped by a crook in ballet slippers (Edward Norton), the attempt to get him back, and also possibly how Roebuck was jailed for being gay, where he occupied the same cell currently containing a small weird man played by Willem Dafoe. There are reasons for all this, and an outcome to the kidnap plot, and delectable photography of sumptuous meals as police map out a plan to rescue the boy.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It feels hyperbolic to say that Anderson’s films have no obvious reference points, but it’s pretty much true. He’s an original. So in lieu of listing all of his films, here’s a highly subjective best-to-least-best ranking of them, subject to change as years go by and perspectives evolve, with The French Dispatch slotted wishy-washily in the middle because not enough time has passed to thoroughly assess its staying power, and with regrets for the low ranking of Fantastic Mr. Fox, which maybe should be at no. 1:

1. Rushmore
2. The Grand Budapest Hotel
3. The Royal Tenenbaums
4. Fantastic Mr. Fox
5. Moonrise Kingdom
6. The French Dispatch
7. Bottle Rocket
8. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
9. Isle of Dogs
10. The Darjeeling Limited

Performance Worth Watching: High-profile cast members not heretofore mentioned: Bob Balaban, Henry Winkler, Liev Schreiber, Saoirse Ronan, Christoph Waltz, Elisabeth Moss. Yet nobody made me laugh like Lois Smith, playing Upshur “Maw” Clampette, an art aficionado with a heavy yokel drawl deployed in the pursuit of atomic-grade farce.

Memorable Dialogue: Deadpan, of course:

Zeffirelli: Why are you crying?

Lucinda Krementz: Tear gas. Also, I suppose I’m sad.

Sex and Skin: IMDb says the “sex and nudity” content is “severe,” but jeez, it’s just an image or four of men and women with no clothes on.

Our Take: What, exactly does all this add up to? A Wes Anderson movie, that’s what. A Wes Anderson movie about… itself? Somewhat. Something else? A rare and thoughtful type of long-form journalism that’s surely better for its creators’ lapses in objectivity and propensity for making their stories reflect their emotions and personal feelings. Is there a greater account of the bombing of Dresden in World War II than Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five? Likely not. You may watch The French Dispatch in a quest for “overarching themes,” but I think you’re looking up when you should be looking down, beneath the floorboards of the screenplay, where the hearts of good writers reside, in boxes, throbbing with a telltale pulse, loud and interminable. Because good writers cannot stick to simple fact and observation and description, or divorce themselves from feelings of empathy.

I’d be delinquent in my journalistic duties not to point out that a movie featuring appealingly funny and complex portrayals of writers is a very good way to get positive reviews. (I’d say it feels like flattery, but good writers tend to loathe the idea that they’re good writers.) But Anderson has been enjoying positive reviews for more than two decades, even for movies that are about people other than writers. This is a long way of saying that Anderson is playing to his base with The French Dispatch, and is perfectly content to do so, perfecting the minutiae of his quick-witted technique. And so, here are all the things that add up to a Wes Anderson movie:

• Nesting-doll narratives
• Understated and tightly modulated performances from an absurdly large big-name ensemble (many who have previously starred in Wes Anderson films)
• Symmetry, symmetry, symmetry
• Side-scrolling tracking shots
• 2-D flatness
• Lotsa on-screen text
• Voiceover narration
• Painstaking arrangement of items and/or people in a shot
• Distinctive color palettes
• Sad/lonely/brooding undercurrent masked by irony/satire/parody
• Heightened depictions of reality
• Exquisitely detailed sets, sometimes depicting cross-sections of boats, planes or buildings
• Convolution

There are more Andersonisms. These are just the big ones, all of them accounted for in Dispatch, in bountiful spades, Anderson’s mannerisms perhaps more pronounced in their eccentricity and complexity than ever before. So consider yourself warned if you’re weary of such things, yet why would you be? Anderson releases a new film every two or three years, and without fail it’s the only film to look, sound and feel like that out of those two or three years. He never fails to find comedy and pathos in his oddball characters who live inside little ornately designed boxes, in a world more visually fantastical than ours, but one that’s quite often similar in its poignant emotional currency. Conclusion: Wes Anderson is getting ever better at making Wes Anderson movies.

Our Call: And we love Wes Anderson movies, right? Right. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Where to stream The French Dispatch