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It’s not really possible to spoil any of the major episodes, but it’s also foolish to try to summarize them. The cast is as enormous and as heterogeneous as the list of names in a New Yorker holiday “Greetings, Friends” poem:
Mathieu Amalric! Edward Norton!
Elisabeth Moss and Jason Schwartzman!
Adrien Brody, Lyna Khoudri,
Owen Wilson, even Fonzie!
And so on. The shifts in tone from melancholy to antic are an Anderson signature, heightened by switches from black-and-white to color, from live action to animation, and from what could be the ’30s or ’40s to what might be the ’60s or ’70s.
After an introduction (with voice-over from Anjelica Huston) and a prose-poem tour of Ennui (conducted by Wilson on a bicycle), we settle into a stretch of what the real New Yorker liked to call “long fact” pieces. Each feature is, in effect, a double portrait: of the writer at work on the story and of a charismatic, elusive central character, set against a busy backdrop of mayhem and intrigue. Roebuck Wright is paired with a precinct-house chef (Stephen Park); Lucinda Krementz (McDormand) with a rebellious student (Timothée Chalamet); J.K.L. Berensen (Swinton) with a tormented painter (Benicio Del Toro). The fact that both of the women writers sleep with their sources suggests that this love letter to journalism might have benefited from an editor with an eye for repetition and cliché.
In any issue of any publication, some pieces will be stronger than others. “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner,” Wright’s culinary crime story, is hectic and complicated, with a nice, bittersweet payoff. Swinton’s offering, “The Concrete Masterpiece,” with Del Toro in a straitjacket and Léa Seydoux in and out of an asylum-guard’s uniform is, to me, both the silliest of the chapters and the most moving. “Revisions to a Manifesto,” with McDormand chronicling a May ’68-ish student protest (and her affair with one of its leaders, played by Chalamet), struck me as the thinnest and most strenuous in its whimsy, offering a too-clever pastiche of real-world events that flattens and trivializes them.
On the other hand, it reminded me of “Masculin Féminin,” one of my favorite Godard movies. A certain amount of the delight you find in “The French Dispatch” may derive from your appreciation of the cultural moments and artifacts it evokes. Anderson expresses a fan’s zeal and a collector’s greed for both canonical works and weird odds and ends, a love for old modernisms that is undogmatic and unsentimental.
Which is not to say unfeeling. A sign above Howitzer’s office door says “No Crying,” and while a few tears are shed onscreen, the stories themselves leave the viewer’s eyes mostly dry. But there is something unmistakably elegiac in this dream of a bygone world. The French Dispatch existed for 50 years, shutting down in 1975, and “The French Dispatch” registers the loss of a particular set of values that blossomed in that era and have since fallen on hard times.
The madman’s work painted on Ennui’s asylum walls in “The Concrete Masterpiece” eventually finds a home in a Kansas museum “10 miles from the geographic center of the United States,” thanks to the good taste and business acumen of a prairie dowager (Lois Smith). That’s not a joke. She, Howitzer and the various misfits who turn up in Ennui represent an ideal of down-to-earth American cosmopolitanism, an approach to writing, culture and the world that is at once democratic and sophisticated, animated by curiosity and leavened with irony. The movie is a love letter to that spirit, and also a ghost story.
The French Dispatch
Rated R. Sex, murder, cigarettes. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters.
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