Gustaw Szymański

Wes Anderson is one of my favorite directors of all time. I simply adore his unique style and all the characteristic features of his works which make his movies so fresh and distinct.   That’s why “The French Dispatch” was probably my most anticipated premiere of this year. I was especially excited because, although we got the stop motion animation “Isle of Dogs” in 2018, the last time we got the ‘true’, live-action Wes Anderson was in 2014 with “The Grand Budapest Hotel” premiered. If you’ve watched this movie, you probably understand why the bar was set high and if you haven’t watched it, it’s time you do, because you are missing out on one of the best movies of the past decade. I was aware that following up on such a work of art will be challenging, however, I knew that Anderson, of all filmmakers, could do it. His filmography, since his debut in 1994 with “Bottle Rocket”, has been constantly evolving and with every next movie, he has been more thoroughly exploring his style and finding new ways of playing with the art of cinema. It seemed like “The French Dispatch” is again going to be a step up and the trailers only reassured me. The idea was more complicated than before, the cast was simply ridiculous, filled with names of everybody’s favorite actors, and the small French city felt like a perfect setting for Anderson’s movie. I went to the cinema with all this excitement expecting to get a movie of the decade, which only recently has begun. Unfortunately, I didn’t get that, however, with all its imperfections I still got a ton of joy from watching Anderson’s new movie. 

“The French Dispatch” is a homage to twentieth-century journalism, more specifically to the New Yorker and its issues from that period. The title of this movie is the name of a fictional magazine published in a lovely French town beaming with its unique atmosphere. The movie is an anthology, a set of a few independent stories, inspired by real articles, which are all told from the perspective of one of the magazine’s writers. They are all linked by short fragments presenting the work-life and the creative process of all these journalists and their supervisor and founder of this newspaper, Arthur Howitzer Jr, wonderfully played by Bill Murray. 

This anthology structure is something I want to focus on in this review because it impacted every other element of this movie. It’s hard to say if it was a good choice to present the story in this way, as it turned out to be a double-edged sword. Definitely, it allowed Anderson to pack even more fresh ideas and visual nuances into one movie than before. Every story is told in a different tone and unique style with a separate set of actors. This gives the movie so much character. Because of how much it has to offer, during the séance it is constantly surprising and entertaining. The visuals, again, were stellar and all the featured locations atmospheric, with the main city, filmed in the small French town of Angoulême, being the highlight. Also, most of the fun little things Anderson likes to implement in his works, like the use of captions or many various style changes made the pictures even more charming. Like I mentioned, the same is with actors, who are mostly assigned only to one story. However, even in this form, Wes wasn’t able to introduce so many of them in the film, which resulted in many top-notch Hollywood stars, appearing only for a brief moment in order to make place for another one. At some point it became somewhat frustrating with William Dafoe, not even getting an episodical role, appearing for about 15 seconds. Overall, it is understandable why Anderson chose to present the story in this and not another way, since otherwise, it would have been impossible to put so many different things in one movie. It also gave him a possibility to experiment and simply play with cinema, and it truly feels like he had a ton of fun while doing so. 

However, like I earlier mentioned, there were some drawbacks to this choice. Since his debut, the main critique of Anderson’s work was that his movies are “style over substance”. I personally always disagreed with this statement, with the one exception being “The Isle of Dogs” where it was clear that Wes wanted to focus purely on the visuals. Here, this is not the case, and it feels like all of the stories have a ton of potential, which is unfortunately, in my opinion, only reached in one of them. There are two main reasons for this. The first one is obviously the structure and the intention of the director to use it in order to present as many ideas as possible. The second one is the length of the movie. One of my favorite features of Anderson’s films was the fact that usually, they are about 90 minutes long. In an era when most big-budget productions have, on average, an intimidating two-hour-and-thirty-something-minute-long running time, shorter is certainly appreciated. Also, Anderson has a talent to make every one of those 90 minutes important and entertaining, which has always impressed me. However, there is a limit to how much it is possible to put in this amount of time and I feel like the story he had planned for “The French Dispatch” was simply impossible to tell without prolonging the screen time. These two things made it so that I got to see a ton of fresh and intriguing ideas, but none of them were explored more deeply, or had much impact on me. Only the last one, which at first seemed to be the least exciting, achieved its full potential. Not only was it joyful to watch, but in it, Anderson was able to say something and convey an interesting message which made it my favorite one out of the main three presented in the film. This showed me how great this movie could have been, if not the limiting 90-minute mark and Wes’s slightly too ambitious of a vision. 

“The French Dispatch” is full of joy and character, especially on the visual side. All the characters and colorful places make up a one-of-a-kind atmosphere, which defines this movie. The amount of ideas and nuances introduced by Anderson is ridiculous and makes this movie really entertaining. However, this doesn’t allow it to go any deeper and tell a truly compelling story, which I found somewhat disappointing, considering the fact that Anderson achieved this in multiple earlier works. Although it may seem that I didn’t enjoy this movie, I would recommend it to anyone purely because of how fun it is to watch. Anderson’s visuals will never get old and there is something in this movie that will brighten up anyone’s day. Having said that, it will certainly not remain in my memory for as long as his other works did and it definitely left me unsatisfied. I saw a glimpse of how great this movie could have been, and it’s a shame it didn’t achieve its full potential.