The French Dispatch. Photo / Searchlight Pictures
Greg and Zanna review Wes Anderson's latest act of cinematic precision.
SCORES
The golden age of The New Yorker: 5
The golden age of Wes Anderson: 5
The golden age of William Sebring: N/A
SHE SAW
Within the first few minutes of The French Dispatch, Greg leaned over to me and said, "This is the best movie I've ever seen." There's something so beguiling about Wes Anderson films - watching them feels like watching a moving diorama. There's such particularity to the aesthetic, such a high level of precision to every aspect of the set design, it wouldn't feel out of place for a giant hand to reach in, pick up Timothee Chalamet by the head and move him over half a centimetre.
One of Anderson's earlier films, Rushmore, is - or perhaps was - Greg's favourite movie of all time. His quirky, absurdist humour appeals to us even though narratively the films can sometimes be hit and miss. The French Dispatch is lots and lots of hits but overall, for me, not a total knockout film. There was so much I loved about each scene and story but it suffered from not having a compelling narrative throughline. The film is a set of vignettes, each one an "article" in an issue of an American magazine outpost in France: "The French Dispatch."
It's riddled with wonderful performances from some of Anderson's frequent muses: Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, etc. Several new additions are excellent as well - notably Benicio Del Toro, who plays an imprisoned artist in what was the most well-drawn story of the bunch and Chalamet, who I came to finally understand the hysteria over. There are more too, all exceptional.
It's hard to imagine that Anderson hasn't made this ode to magazine journalism in response to the increasing distrust of the media in a post-Trump era and yet it's in no way didactic. Of course, notions of truth and ethics are in the mix but it's far more interested in a romantic view of the pursuit of a good story. It is tales of passionate writers getting drawn into the world they're writing about until they're in so deep they become part of the story themselves. It's no wonder Greg was immediately taken with it - he is the Jeffrey Wright character; sent to do a story on one thing and coming out with a story on something else altogether.
Now, 24 hours later, Greg no longer thinks it's the best film he's ever seen, which makes sense. Entering the world of The French Dispatch is utterly mesmerising but an anthology film is an anthology film - it never quite fills that narrative void we seek to satisfy with a good movie. As a television series though? I'd be all over it.
HE SAW
If you're a writer who's ever harboured a dream of writing egregiously long, self-aggrandising magazine articles, as I have, that dream has almost certainly been shaped, or at least influenced, by the golden age/s of The New Yorker magazine, when its writers were wildly creative, eccentric and sometimes extravagantly unproductive, and there was, apparently, no condemnation for this in performance reviews, which I assume took place during all-afternoon drinking sessions at a series of bohemian bars in the East Village, at which the primary aim was the exchange of brilliant witticisms and/or telling anecdotes.
Every part of that experience seems so impossibly romantic: The power of the words alone: "The New Yorker", "telling anecdotes", "egregiously long" are enough to send me into a reverie as deep and affecting as a film by Wes Anderson, who it seems, has been equally affected by them, since his latest movie is a love letter to them.
The greatest story to come out of the golden age/s of The New Yorker, or at least the one that has most affected me, is that of Joseph Mitchell, the brilliant journalist who produced the greatest magazine profile ever written, the 40,000 word Joe Gould's Secret (later republished as a book), after which he worked another 30 years at The New Yorker without writing another word.
The New Yorker's co-founder and golden age editor-in-chief Harold Ross once wrote of Mitchell, "Excellent quality, low productivity" which sounds to me less like judgement than a manifesto for living: something to strive for in this era of mass production and consumption of mostly valueless words.
Mitchell died in 1996 but interest in his work and life has never gone away. His most recent surge in popularity was generated by a 2015 biography, which revealed he didn't always stick to the facts, making up not just quotes, but whole characters. Following these revelations, many modern journalists and other self-appointed moral watchdogs gnashed their teeth to bits in morally absolute thinkpieces, but nobody outside journalism much cared, and they continue not to.
Mitchell was and is and will continue to be remembered not because he made stuff up but because his writing was excellent and he didn't do much of it. Meanwhile, his contemporary and colleague William Sebring, who wrote exponentially more words for The New Yorker, and whose journalistic integrity has never been in question, has been almost entirely forgotten, although it could be argued part of the reason for that is I just made him up.
The French Dispatch is in cinemas now.