Here’s the thing about Wes Anderson: he basically makes very similar movies. He likes movies with a certain look that you recognize when you see it. He works with a lot of the same actors over and over again. The soundtrack tends to be a lot of vaguely familiar B-sides from a couple decades ago. You can never quite tell what time period the movie is set in, and in many cases, where the movie is supposed to be set. Basically, Anderson is a man whose work you either really like or you don’t. I have yet to find anyone who falls somewhere in-between, and now he has a new movie out called The French Dispatch of the Liberty Kansas Evening Star.
I happen to like Anderson’s work, and I am not retyping that full title again.
The plot, such as it is, is that at one point in his youth, Arthur Howitzer Jr (Bill Murray) left Liberty, Kansas and went to the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blaise in France, took over the magazine supplement from his father’s newspaper, and hired the best American writers living abroad to write stories as they saw fit. The magazine gained a world-wide following, but Arthur’s will dictated that the magazine was to close up and end upon his death, and that just happened, so the movie is basically retelling the stories in his last issue, starting with Arthur’s obituary. As such, this is basically an anthology movie where each chapter is a story in this magazine, Anderson’s tribute to The New Yorker.
As for the stories, following Arthur’s obituary, there’s a bicycle-based tour of Ennui from writer Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson, who seems to wear a bike helmet everywhere), followed by a piece on a jailed artist by J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton), a piece on a student rebellion from Mrs. Krementz (Frances McDormand), and finally a piece on a police chef from Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright). But these are Anderson stories, so there are twists. The artist (Benecio del Toro) is a psychotic murderer who paints nudes of one of the guards (Lea Seydoux) in a modern art style, but his biggest problem is lack of inspiration. The student protest led by Zeffirelli (Timothee Chalamet) is negotiating the right to let the dorms be co-ed using a game of chess to win concessions. And the chef is called away when his superior’s son is kidnapped by a group of shady characters led by Edward Norton, and the top cop will pull out all the stops imaginable to get his son back.
Now, here’s the thing about anthologies: they are only as good as the weakest story, but this is also Wes Anderson, and Anderson, no matter what you may think of him and his work, is if nothing else incredibly consistent. So, really, there is no “strongest” or “weakest” story. They’re all basically the same, so if you enjoy Anderson’s work, this will be just fine. The magazine acts as a framing device, meaning the writers all interact with Murray’s editor at some point in time, but that’s about it. There’s no plotline running through the movie as a whole.
And for me, that’s fine. I do enjoy Anderson’s work. This is a movie with a huge cast, many of them Anderson veterans, but all of whom have distinctive looks and voices that fit his world even if many of them are only briefly in the movie. But this was also something like Anderson going all out. There’s generally a somewhat artificial look to the worlds he creates, and indeed, I don’t think anyone other than Stanley Kubrick puts as much work into the symmetrical nature of his shot composition, but the difference being Kubrick’s work is meant to draw the eye somewhere and alienate the viewer. Anderson’s gives off a nice glow of a nostalgia for a place that never existed, populated by people who have great vocabularies but don’t always seem like real people. And this time, the movie looks even more artificial as the movie flops back and forth between color and black-and-white seeming at random, set pieces literally slide in and out of shots, and the movie even cuts to animation a couple times. This is not a real world, but it is an inviting one, and I was glad to visit.
That said…it was a little weird that I saw Lea Seydoux in both this and No Time to Die, but somehow, she showed a lot more skin in the Anderson movie than as the Bond girl. While it’s not like Anderson’s filmography is full of family friendly movies, it still seemed a little weird to me when I stopped to think about it.
Grade: A-
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