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cjlasky7My patient is asleep. I'm a little bored. Time for a movie review!
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At this point in his career, Wes Anderson's stylistic quirks are so familiar that any film major with decent computer skills could assemble a halfway decent parody of a Wes Anderson movie. We all know about the surfeit of background details, his perfectly symmetrical mise-en-scene, his clipped dialogue, the tracking shots following a character through cutaway sets, and the profusion of booklets, leaflets, placards, posters, letters and other bibliophilia stuffed into every crevice of his movies.
For Anderson, the rectangle of the movie screen is like a jewelry box filled with all the memorabilia that evokes the joys and wonders of his childhood; and on that level, watching a Wes Anderson movie is like sifting through that jewelry box and finding a little hidden treasure in every lovingly curated item.
The pertinent question for the viewer, though, is: does all of this... stuff... lend itself to recognizable human drama? Or is it just Anderson indulging himself and expecting the audience to ooh and aaah at (say) a vintage 1940s Boy Scout manual he bought at a flea market in Nantucket?
"The French Dispatch" has been praised as peak Anderson, but I don't think it reaches the heights of Royal Tannenbaums or Grand Budapest Hotel...hell, or even Fantastic Mister Fox. It's filled with more great stuff than ever, and it does contain maybe the greatest single performance in an Anderson film, but the archness of his approach completely overwhelms one segment, and nearly cripples the movie.
The title "objet" is a periodical published by an expatriate American (Bill Murray) from a small town in France, a New Yorker-style literary haven for idiosyncratic writers to indulge their passions. The movie is a video reproduction of the final issue, with each writer narrating his or her story.
We start off with Anderson stalwart Owen Wilson, as he takes us on a bicycle tour of the town of Ennui-sur-Blase. (Yes, it's one of many cutesy pseudo-French names scattered through the movie; you can either find it adorable or nauseating.) This is a typical Anderson palate cleanser, giving us the background information on the main location. It's slight, but Wilson's delivery elevates the material, and there are enough dark corners (the marauding bands of students and the disturbingly consistent weekly count of bodies dredged from the river) to make it entertaining.
The first major segment features Benicio del Toro as a Tortured Lunatic Artist and Lea Seydoux as his Muse, his lover, his model and literally his keeper: Del Toro's Moses Rosenthaler is in prison for a gruesome double murder (totally did it), and Seydoux's Simone is his guardienne. The segment is a not-very-original meditation on the intersection of art, love, madness and commerce, but the performances make it sing. It's like listening to a great jazz combo: Del Toro lays down the beat, Seydoux provides the basic melody, and Adrien Brody and Tilda Swinton (as an excitable art impresario and the segment's narrator) play some tasty solos to round out the overall performance.
Right after that we run into trouble. The second segment is basically a retelling of the Paris student uprising of 1968 as covered by a veteran reporter (played by Frances McDormand). I despised this section. It reduced one of the most profound political events of recent European history to a snickering, patronizing joke. "Aw look, the kids think they're doing something significant. Aren't they cute? Ah, youth!" Bleah. McDormand doesn't come off great here, either. Her character talks constantly about maintaining her journalistic objectivity and fails spectacularly, rewriting the students' manifesto and falling into bed with their leader...
Yes, you read that right.
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I can just imagine the conversation in McDormand's household:
[Joel Cohen stares at the script.]
COHEN: So....you have a love scene. With Timothee Chalamet.
[McDormand bobs her head from side to side.]
McDORMAND: Well...sort of.
COHEN: Is there nudity?
McDORMAND [laughs]: Please.
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I know that's the joke, but Anderson just hammers at it over and over, and it turns the reporter into a one-dimensional character. This is one case where Anderson's sense of whimsy completely sabotages the material.
The final segment course corrects beautifully, featuring Jeffrey Wright as the magazine's resident food reporter, an obvious knockoff of James Baldwin. And holy mother of God, if Wright can lend this much dramatic heft to a knockoff, imagine what he could do in a biographical movie of the real Baldwin. (Somebody greenlight that script, stat!)
In the middle of one of his reviews, Wright's Roebuck gets tangled in the plot to kidnap the son of Ennui's chief of police. But even as we follow that plot to its absurd extremes, we get a clearer sense of the writer--his genius, his loneliness as a black man, a homosexual and an expatriate and how the restaurant table is maybe the only place where he feels welcome. Just a stellar performance by Wright; and with the epitaph for the magazine as the coda, the movie ends strong.
In conclusion: if you're a fan of Wes Anderson, you definitely have to see this movie. Even if you're not, I would recommend it for Wright's performance and the sheer pleasure of sifting through Anderson's jewelry box.
Grade: 3-1/2 ☆ out of 5
*************************
At this point in his career, Wes Anderson's stylistic quirks are so familiar that any film major with decent computer skills could assemble a halfway decent parody of a Wes Anderson movie. We all know about the surfeit of background details, his perfectly symmetrical mise-en-scene, his clipped dialogue, the tracking shots following a character through cutaway sets, and the profusion of booklets, leaflets, placards, posters, letters and other bibliophilia stuffed into every crevice of his movies.
For Anderson, the rectangle of the movie screen is like a jewelry box filled with all the memorabilia that evokes the joys and wonders of his childhood; and on that level, watching a Wes Anderson movie is like sifting through that jewelry box and finding a little hidden treasure in every lovingly curated item.
The pertinent question for the viewer, though, is: does all of this... stuff... lend itself to recognizable human drama? Or is it just Anderson indulging himself and expecting the audience to ooh and aaah at (say) a vintage 1940s Boy Scout manual he bought at a flea market in Nantucket?
"The French Dispatch" has been praised as peak Anderson, but I don't think it reaches the heights of Royal Tannenbaums or Grand Budapest Hotel...hell, or even Fantastic Mister Fox. It's filled with more great stuff than ever, and it does contain maybe the greatest single performance in an Anderson film, but the archness of his approach completely overwhelms one segment, and nearly cripples the movie.
The title "objet" is a periodical published by an expatriate American (Bill Murray) from a small town in France, a New Yorker-style literary haven for idiosyncratic writers to indulge their passions. The movie is a video reproduction of the final issue, with each writer narrating his or her story.
We start off with Anderson stalwart Owen Wilson, as he takes us on a bicycle tour of the town of Ennui-sur-Blase. (Yes, it's one of many cutesy pseudo-French names scattered through the movie; you can either find it adorable or nauseating.) This is a typical Anderson palate cleanser, giving us the background information on the main location. It's slight, but Wilson's delivery elevates the material, and there are enough dark corners (the marauding bands of students and the disturbingly consistent weekly count of bodies dredged from the river) to make it entertaining.
The first major segment features Benicio del Toro as a Tortured Lunatic Artist and Lea Seydoux as his Muse, his lover, his model and literally his keeper: Del Toro's Moses Rosenthaler is in prison for a gruesome double murder (totally did it), and Seydoux's Simone is his guardienne. The segment is a not-very-original meditation on the intersection of art, love, madness and commerce, but the performances make it sing. It's like listening to a great jazz combo: Del Toro lays down the beat, Seydoux provides the basic melody, and Adrien Brody and Tilda Swinton (as an excitable art impresario and the segment's narrator) play some tasty solos to round out the overall performance.
Right after that we run into trouble. The second segment is basically a retelling of the Paris student uprising of 1968 as covered by a veteran reporter (played by Frances McDormand). I despised this section. It reduced one of the most profound political events of recent European history to a snickering, patronizing joke. "Aw look, the kids think they're doing something significant. Aren't they cute? Ah, youth!" Bleah. McDormand doesn't come off great here, either. Her character talks constantly about maintaining her journalistic objectivity and fails spectacularly, rewriting the students' manifesto and falling into bed with their leader...
Yes, you read that right.
*************************
I can just imagine the conversation in McDormand's household:
[Joel Cohen stares at the script.]
COHEN: So....you have a love scene. With Timothee Chalamet.
[McDormand bobs her head from side to side.]
McDORMAND: Well...sort of.
COHEN: Is there nudity?
McDORMAND [laughs]: Please.
*****************************
I know that's the joke, but Anderson just hammers at it over and over, and it turns the reporter into a one-dimensional character. This is one case where Anderson's sense of whimsy completely sabotages the material.
The final segment course corrects beautifully, featuring Jeffrey Wright as the magazine's resident food reporter, an obvious knockoff of James Baldwin. And holy mother of God, if Wright can lend this much dramatic heft to a knockoff, imagine what he could do in a biographical movie of the real Baldwin. (Somebody greenlight that script, stat!)
In the middle of one of his reviews, Wright's Roebuck gets tangled in the plot to kidnap the son of Ennui's chief of police. But even as we follow that plot to its absurd extremes, we get a clearer sense of the writer--his genius, his loneliness as a black man, a homosexual and an expatriate and how the restaurant table is maybe the only place where he feels welcome. Just a stellar performance by Wright; and with the epitaph for the magazine as the coda, the movie ends strong.
In conclusion: if you're a fan of Wes Anderson, you definitely have to see this movie. Even if you're not, I would recommend it for Wright's performance and the sheer pleasure of sifting through Anderson's jewelry box.
Grade: 3-1/2 ☆ out of 5
