"Writing on Purpose: A Review of Wes Anderson's 'The French Dispatch'" by Sara Perkins

Writing on Purpose

Sara Perkins The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, a film by Wes Anderson Searchlight Pictures, 2021.

I didn’t think too much of it the first time. I had been excited to see Wes Anderson’s new film, The French Dispatch, but realized as I walked out that I wanted the feeling I had after watching The Royal Tenenbaums—the feeling of being both a little bit confused by what happened and yet knowing, almost instinctually, what happened. I wanted a feeling of reflection. But I was just confused. Anderson, in all his quirky Andersonness, put so much of his style into the film it was difficult to tell if French Dispatch was about a culture magazine in France, its particular but caring editor, the contributing writers, or the stories they tell. It was like looking through a kaleidoscope and trying to find the shell.

While the plot is difficult to parse, the structure of The French Dispatch is pretty straightforward. It opens with the narrator (Anjelica Huston) introducing the life and death of Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), the editor of the magazine previously known as The Sunday Picnic, located in Liberty, Kansas, now relocated to Ennui-sur-Blasé, France and called The French Dispatch. The film then moves on to four stories by the staff writers of The French Dispatch: Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson) gives us a tour of past and present Ennui on his bike; J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton) lectures on the genius of incarcerated

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artist, Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro); Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand) reports on a budding student revolution led by Zeffirelli (Timothee Chalamet); Roebuck Wright ( Jeffery Wright) recaps his harrowing dinner experience with the Commissaire (Mathieu Amalric) of the Ennui police. And it ends back in Howitzer’s office with his staff collectively writing his obituary, asking “what happens next?”

Fine. It works. Each vignette has its arc, but they are disparate, and the film as a whole seems unsure about what it wants to say. I have seen enough of Wes Anderson’s work to know that it wants to tell you something—really, you only need to watch one of his films to know this. No one composes shots to look like photos by accident; everything is intentional. Anderson grabs you by the ears with his colorful frames and even more colorful characters and says, “Pay attention. This is important.”

But with French Dispatch, I was lost. That is not to say that The French Dispatch doesn’t fit into Anderson’s repertoire. It has every marking of a Wes Anderson film—quirky characters, vibrant colors, whimsical storylines, angular camera movement. He actually includes a quality from every film he’s previously made.

And perhaps that’s the problem. There was so much happening that I couldn’t tell what the important thing was. Was it too much whimsy? Was there not enough whimsy? Was the sadness that Anderson’s eccentric characters carry inside themselves too overt? Or was it too washed out by the black and white to color, to stop motion, to live action, to animation, to why is everything moving so quickly I don’t know where to focus?

The second time was better. Maybe it was that I went in without expectations. Maybe it was that I just wanted desperately to like it. Maybe it was that I got popcorn. But somehow, I saw a thread running through the film. The French Dispatch operates in the town of Ennui-Sur-Blasé, which simply translates to

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“boredom upon apathy.” I think a more accurate translation would be “being dissatisfied with the way things are while being unmotivated to change.” This seems to be the conceit of the film. How do people work against the “ennui sur blasé” of life? For Anderson, the answer is simple: through art and art-making, we have a chance to move out of the mundanity of living and experience beauty and relationship. We see it in the artist-prisoner seeking companionship and approval from his muse-guard (Léa Seydoux) and his art dealer-prison mate (Adrien Brody); the journalist confronting her age and lifestyle by interacting with the student revolutionaries; the foodie-foreigner longing for connection in an unfamiliar place; even the editor, who’s care and consideration toward his staff is reciprocated upon his death through the collective recreation of his life.

Maybe I’m pulling at straws. Maybe I’m making it all up because I want it to mean something more than it does. Maybe The French Dispatch is just an ode to The New Yorker. Fine. Maybe it doesn’t actually matter because it is colorful, it is composed, it is quirky and in those ways, it is intentional. As The French Dispatch’s editor tells his writers, “Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” And Wes Anderson has at least done that.