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The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Star

Directed by Wes Anderson
Screenplay by Wes Anderson

Stories by Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinness, Jason Schwartzman

2021

Streaming now (2022) on Disney +

CAST

Benicio Del Toro- Moses Rosenthaler
Adrian Brody- Julian Cadazio
Tilda Swinton – J.K. L. Berenson
Lea Seydoux – Simone
Frances McDormand – Lucinda Kremetz
Timothée Chalamet – Zeffirelli
Lyna Khoudri- Juliette
Jeffrey Wright- Roebuck Wright
Matthieu Amalric – The Commissaire
Steve Park – Nescaffier
Bill Murray – Arthur Howitzer Jnr
Owen Wilson – Herbsaint Sazerac
Elisabeth Moss- Alumna
Christopher Waltz – Paul Duval
Tom Hudson – Mitch Mitch
Edward Norton – The Chauffeur
Saoirse Ronan – Junkie / Showgirl
Angelica Huston (narration voice over)

I have a problem with most Wes Anderson films. Not all of them. The Darjeeling Limited is not only one I’ve watched half a dozen times, but one we bought as gifts for several friends when we saw five or six of them in a discounted section. We bought the lot. One of my all-time favourites. The Royal Tennenbaums is another great one.

I’m not going to do a long review either- the film has generated enough interpretation and lavish praise online. The thing is, I only find most Wes Anderson comedy intermittently funny. He can screw up for me, by straining too hard, going over the top, being too clever, I can’t define what it is. Over twenty years ago, I spent an evening with Bob Spiers discussing comedy. Bob himself was a great comedy director. We agreed that Dad’s Army and Fawlty Towers (both of which he directed for some episodes) remain as funny as the day they were first aired, while Monty Python and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In now fail to raise even the glimmer of a smile. Why? It is the difference between ‘being funny’ and ‘trying to be funny.’ In recent years, I’ve found most Peter Sellars films fall into the same trap. Films I thought wonderful in the 60s now just seem daft.

This one is complex. It’s technically outstanding (that’s a given) from the colour palette(s), to the deliberately aged B&W sequences, to the screen shape that is mainly 35 mm but broadens out to widescreen sometimes. Then the B&W sequences alternate with colour for later reminiscences about them, and are dotted with little bits of colour in the middle. The sets are fake but wonderful. I love the obvious SFX airplanes which morph into a cutaway then into real action inside the cutaways.  My absolute favourite part is at the end when the car chase turns into drawn animation, in a beguiling mix of New Yorker style and TinTin.

Then you have Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton, Francis McDormand, Adrian Brody, Elisabeth Moss. Anderson can rustle up a cast at will. Then you get blink and you miss them appearances by Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, Christopher Waltz, let alone Angelica Huston doing the voice over narration.

The film is based on journalism that Anderson loved, mainly in The New Yorker. The journalists in the film are stand-ins for the greats he admired, so that Roebuck Wright in the film, is based on James Baldwin. The originals are listed as inspiration in the credits

The frame story is that The French Dispatch is a colour supplement within The Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. Liberty, Kansas is just ten miles from the geographical centre of the continental USA. A French office was established in the town of Ennui-sur-Blasé for the son of the proprietor who assembled great journalists in France to submit their weekly dispatches to America. The frame is an obituary for Arthur Howitzer Jnr (Bill Murray) the managing editor. He has ruled that on his death the printing presses be melted down. I love the omnipresent journalist languidly reading a book, who hasn’t completed an article in twenty-three years.

Then we have four pieces related to articles by specific journalists.

The Cycling Reporter

A marvellous full-colour sequence with Owen Wilson as Herbsaint Sanzerac, exploring the town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. This has split screen with B&W ‘past’ versus colour present.’ At this point the film is motoring powerfully, we’re sitting up looking forward to another 90 minutes of the same. It’s the shortest sequence, in a way, much too short … but that may be why it works the best of all.

The Concrete Masterpiece

The frame piece is arts journalist J.K.L. Berenson (Tilda Swinton) delivering a lecture (colour) on the concrete masterpiece, an 11 piece fresco on concrete which has had its own museum built to house it. Her prosthetic teeth deserve a separate cast listing. We flashback to see the artist, Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro) in Ennui prison in B&W. He is painting a nude Simone (Lea Seydoux) who turns out to be his guard. Rosenthaler is a double chainsaw murderer, and in a straitjacket between painting. A fellow inmate who is an art dealer, Julien Cadazio (Adrian Brody) discovers him.

Technically excellent, with the film looking 1930s. Splashes of colour for the mad paintings, cavernous prison halls, freeze frame with people moving through. 

It still held us, and it becomes increasingly clear that as well as a pastich of the magazine, Anderson is having fun with 1930s / 1940s cinema. Here it works a treat.

Revisions to A Manifesto

This is where it starts to go so badly wrong for me, in spite of Frances McDormand as the reporter (poetry and politics section of the paper) She is reporting on student protests (think Paris 1968). The central student characters are called Zefferelli and Juliette (Geddit?). Zefferelli is trying to write a Manifesto for the revolutionary protests.

It’s mainly Black and White with puzzling breaks into a colour stage musical by Kremetz based on the story. Here, I felt Anderson is pinning the worst over-serious French films of the 50s and 60s, when France was responsible for some po-faced stinkers, usually including an eternal triangle. To me it caused a shudder- University Film Club. Late 60s. My then girlfriend insisted on seeing everything in Italian or French. I still maintain that L’Année dernière à Marienbad is one of the worst films ever made, and I was delighted to see that it appears in at least one book listing the Fifty Worst Movies of All Time.

The problem here was that in sending up the genre of pretentious political, poetic and sexual Gallic 60s crap, it necessarily becomes too much like the genre to be watchable, and we thought this whole section was an in-joke laden excruciatingly unfunny failure.

The Private Dining Room of The Police Commissar

The reporter is Roebuck Wright (played by Jeffrey Wright) as a black, gay, cookery, and crime reporter. He’s doing a colour interview with flashes backs to the B&W story. Again, it’s full of clever (too clever) film references.  It is Zany with a bold underlined capital Z, and exactly what I mean by Anderson trying too hard to be “funny” and the result falling flat on its face.

It is only enlivened when the kidnap of the commissar’s son switches to that colour animation in New Yorker meets TinTin style. They’re not revealing that image online either. It’s worth sitting through those weaker third and fourth sequences for. The car and the kidnapped lad in the front seat are pure TinTin. Glorious animation.

That’s the best bit of the entire film, but the rest of the allegedly zany comedy is simply silly. Note my earlier Peter Sellars references.

So, all in all, a five star first sequence followed by a three / four star second sequence, ending with two single star stories.