LFF 2021: The French Dispatch
LFF 2021For a career that has spawned films like The Royal Tennenbaums, Bottle Rocket, and The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson's latest – albeit delayed – venture The French Dispatch is, undoubtedly, one of the weakest entries into Wes Anderson's filmography. The reasons are plentiful; however, one major issue that arises within The French Dispatch is a clear case of self-interested ego. Granted, this is an apparent cinematic auteur, so self-indulgent aesthetical style should not come to any real surprise. However, throughout Anderson's filmography, there is a clear and evident line of commercial meets indulgence. Not only is that line crossed here, but it is never even laid down for reference.
The French Dispatch is as ego-centric as one could imagine in the context of character, aesthetics, and structure. Again, not without precedent in previous works, but the Anderson motifs are hollow, redundant and, quite frankly, boring. The sheer amount of inclusion regarding avant-garde and 'otherness' dialled into an eleven. What is meant to be unique and characteristic feels like a forced attachment and a bloated parade of hollow iconography for the sake of inclusion to match brand rather than supply flavour or even flair.
Beginning with the self-indulgent screenplay, the writing in The French Dispatch is thankfully comedic and, therefore, a strength in crafting an immersive response. But that very immersion leads to little eventual interest, with the material incredibly flat and lifeless. In fact, so little here is evidently effective within the bloated running time of just under an hour and fifty minutes. Split up in a five act structure with a prologue and epilogue structured before and after, only two of these narratives are – quite frankly and put bluntly – interesting.
The brightest spark is the narrative belonging to Benicio Del Toro and Léa Seydoux. An odd couple, added to a plot with a soul and heart, exploring the medium of art and the broken artists that exhibit such space with Anderson's conventional auteur sense and sensibility. Narrated on and off-screen by the foul-mouthed and superb Tilda Swinton, every frame of this opening act is perfectly blended, albeit again with the forceful and often flat 'otherness' that perpetrates this feature as a whole, taking over and drowning out the thematics that work.
That narrative aside and the final act, supplied by the superb Jefferey Wright – who crafts splendid emotional gravitas and weight – the entire feature is drastically missing in its lite screenplay from the astonishingly four accredited writers, which is genuinely appalling when considering such little emphasis is crafted on character and arcs present. Throughout, with the opening constructed with Owen Wilson and a gargantuan amount of plot given to Timothée Chalamet and Frances McDormand in the second act, two-thirds of The French Dispatch has zero emotive connection with the material at hand. This comes down to two issues. The first is the above mention of the screenplay that often enough is dire with flat and genuinely limited amounts of emotional depth present.
This is in tune with the secondary problem: the structure of being an anthology. So much material feels inconsequential and lifeless with little depth allocated with little time able to evaluate and explore this world and its functional characters. Due to this, the screenplay is then limited only to allocate small instances of character, which ultimately affect performance to feel stagnated and stifled in a formulation of a sort of 'best of' approach. If anything, the interconnected anthology is the key to the issue, and while it thinks it is extravagant and avant-garde – that final chase sequence is outstanding – it really is a simplistic and void venture at times, with little on offer in terms of the internal and would rather have surplus substance and reinforce itself with a flat style.
Granted, approaching Wes Anderson as a creator who produces a filmography with organic and authentic character may not be the hill to die on, but this is such a departure of what made the director great, to begin within his early exploits. The Wes Anderson that is serving cinema now is delivering cold and stagnated material that only interests the director and the director alone. It just marvels the brain that Anderson has somehow figured out that the best way to approach his cinema is to evolve in a matter of lowering the standard of actual character and instead serve flat stylish 'otherness' in its place – a factor that keeps on growing and growing until, rest assured, the director will film silence; his devotees will find solace in its visual. It is an identity that might serve the backdrops of Anderson-inspired homages and those who find bright colours merit of substance, but all in all, it only serves that Anderson and his disciples have got a little clue on the merits of terrific cinema.
