Starring: Bill Murray, Benicio del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Elizabeth Moss, Anjelica Huston, Saoirse Ronan
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios
Runtime: 108 mins. Reviewed in Dec 2021
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan
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This comedy-drama film focuses on three different stories, which are featured in the French foreign section of a fictional American newspaper. The three stories are part of the magazine’s final issue. Wes Anderson directs the movie in highly distinctive style.
This American comedy-drama was produced by the film’s director (Anderson) from a story he conceived with another director, Roman Coppola (and Hugo Guinness and Jason Schwartzman). The film is set in the city of Angouleme, France, and has an engaging musical score constructed by the Anderson’s long-time collaborator, Alexandre Desplat. The movie has been described as a ‘love letter to journalists’ and is about an American newspaper in a fictional, 20th-century French city. It is narrated by Huston who has worked closely with Anderson in the past, and the film is Anderson’s ninth collaboration with actor, Bill Murray.
Anderson is one of the most creative directors in contemporary film-making. He has directed and scripted 10 feature films (this is his 10th), and has been involved in the production of eight of them, including The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and Isle of Dogs (2018). His style blends reality with fantasy and heavily with the absurd. The structure of the film owes much to the format and style of The New Yorker magazine. The film has animated and non-animated sequences; switches frequently from colour to black and white; partitions and patterns its imagery; and dresses its characters in bizarre outfits.
The title of the movie is technically, The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, which the film’s title abridges. The American newspaper is an English-language magazine edited in a fictional French city of Ennui-sur-Blasé, and the film collates three distinct stories. The first is about a psychopathic murderer (del Toro) who is in prison, and paints his prison guard (Lea Seydoux) naked, and he has an art dealer (Adrien Brody) on the outside, who finds it difficult to market the painter’s unusual artistic talents. The second is a story about a young student radical (Timothee Chalamet), who is pursued by a journalist (McDormand) who has an affair with him, and ends up writing his manifesto on student-protests. The third is about the kidnapping of the young son of a police chief, who loves gourmet food.
The newspaper’s founder is Arthur Howitzer Jr (Murray), and Arthur’s ‘will’ stipulates that the magazine must be shut down after his death. Howitzer’s passing is mourned, and Anderson exposes us to three of Horowitz’s valued pieces, telling us how Horowitz edits his magazine to communicate what he wants to say. A huge ensemble cast of well-known actors and actresses take various roles in the film to demonstrate Anderson’s intent. Swinton is on the staff of the newspaper as an art critic, and features in the first of the stories; Moss and Ronan take other journalist roles. The film presents an assortment of vignettes that completely blur reality with fantasy and the absurd. It features cameo performances of eccentric characters who collectively convey enormous oddity. Each frame of the movie is crafted meticulously, and the film’s imagery is densely packed with extraordinary, eye-catching detail.
The film is visually outstanding, and its originality and oddity literally bursts at the seams. An extraordinary group of actors demonstrates the creativity of Anderson’s vision, and the film is alive with energy. So visually spectacular are the images in the film, that some viewers will be left with the impression that the movie’s elaborate outer-casing rather overshadows the thrust of the provocative satire that lies within – which addresses significant issues such as modern critiques of avant-garde art and symbolism, student idealism, and the neutrality of journalists. The film lingers in the mind as a whimsical visual treat that is absorbing in its detail. This is a film that is an eccentric, clever invention of a very talented director. Its narrative coherence might be thin, but the film brilliantly exposes the richness of Anderson’s extraordinary imagination.
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