The Doctor’s Diagnosis: F
I want to begin by quoting what is now my all-time favorite Rotten Tomatoes blurb. This gem comes to us from a positive review of The French Dispatch published by New City Film, a Chicago-based film criticism site:
“An encomium to incunabula and marginalia and compulsive sketching and drenching details,.. footnotable elements by the fistful in every bristling frame… insolent beauty that is sometimes obstinate and sometimes stupid and always indelible.”
I honestly don’t know where to go from there. The almost unfathomable pretentiousness of that praise for Wes Anderson’s work says more about the excruciating pompousness of The French Dispatch than I could say in several volumes. But let’s see what I can do.
This is beyond self-indulgent. This is a filmmaker sucking his own cock and panicking at the thought of having to choose between swallowing and taking a facial because he equally loves taking it both ways from himself. The French Dispatch is Wes Anderson splooging on the screen like a firehose and demanding that his masturbation be acknowledged as artistry or else one risks banishment from all the vegan bakeries in the East Village where his genius is discussed in hushed tones between bites of dairy-free cookies that everyone is pretending don’t taste like shit. Well, fuck you hipster bastards and your fake cheesecake. This film is an agonizing experience that validates every possible cliché about arthouse filmmaking that understandably drives mainstream audiences away in droves.
The French Dispatch is an unbearably pretentious film that is a tribute to an equally pretentious publication: The New Yorker. The movie is basically an anthology with three main stories (and I use the word “stories” lightly) presented as articles being submitted to a fake magazine that is meant to represent The New Yorker. Since the movie is supposed to be emulating the style of a magazine, we also get a travelogue segment (which amount to Owen Wilson riding a bike and making obnoxious observations directly to the camera) and a cartoon segment that exists purely for the sake of quirkiness.
In fact, the entire film exists for the sake of quirkiness. In the battle between style and substance in the filmography of Wes Anderson, substance has always taken a beating. In The French Dispatch, substance doesn’t just lose the battle, it looks like Apollo in the second round against Drago. There are absolutely no characters in this film. At no point does anyone behave or speak like an actual human being. At no point does any situation or interaction have any emotional resonance because the film would prefer to exist purely in the abstract and inspire film school theses rather than genuine responses from the audience. Broadly speaking, the first story is about an artist in prison and the second story is about college students staging a protest. I’m less certain about the third story because, as the ancient proverb puts it, I had run out of fucks to give by that point. It has something to do with a food critic and a kidnapping, but I’ve got nothing beyond that.
Rather than having an interesting story, the film instead relies on pointless visual quirks that seemingly intend to distract from the fact that nothing interesting is happening (the ploy didn’t work). This being a Wes Anderson film, the film is presented in a 1.37:1 aspect ratio that allows for symmetrical images (in non-film geek terms: the image is almost a square). This easily allows actors to be framed in the middle of the image while standing in front of pastel colors or a floral pattern because Wes Anderson’s films exist in a world where pastels and floral patterns make everything cool for some reason (I would probably need a vegan scone to understand). The film switches from black-and-white to color and back again, not for any sort of narrative impact (like The Wizard of Oz) or to create a unique style (like Sin City), but rather to show us just how goddamn sophisticated it is. I also want to challenge you to a drinking game with this movie: Take a shot every time the camera does a horizontal pan between sets. I fucking dare you. You will be seeing pink elephants on parade before you are halfway into this piece of shit.
The French Dispatch often feels like two hours of Wes Anderson bragging about his network of actor friends and proving the point by somehow convincing A-list talent to lower themselves to material that feels like it was written by an obnoxious middle school kid. Look at this fucking cast: Benicio del Toro, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Christoph Waltz, Owen Wilson, Elizabeth Moss, Anjelica Huston, Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Lea Seydoux, Jeffrey Wright, Liev Schreiber, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe, Henry Winkler, Timothee Chalamet and on and on and on. It’s literally one of the greatest casts ever it’s heartbreaking to see this monumental assembly of talent wasted on such a despicable vanity project. Many of these people barely even have anything to do; I think Elizabeth Moss is in two scenes and I don’t think that Henry Winkler even has a line of dialogue. I will give point to Lea Seydoux for going full-nude in the film, though. I previously hated the end of Spectre, but now I fully understand why James Bond went off with her instead of killing Blofeld. Hot damn.
The French Dispatch is a reprehensible monument to unchecked ego. I have never been a fan of Wes Anderson’s work, but this is Wes Anderson completely unchained and without any pretense of creating something that could be labelled as entertainment. There are a couple of months left in 2021, but I think the contest for worst film of the year has officially ended in October. Please god, let me be right about that.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_French_Dispatch#/media/File:The_French_Dispatch.jpeg
