Droll Stories

Sometimes when you wait for something so long, it is a bit of a disappointment when you finally see it.  Such is the case with The French Dispatch.   

The droll stories are very much in keeping with the spirit of The New Yorker of the 1960s, although told from a Midwestern point of view.  The opening story sets the stage, so to speak, with a beret-clad Owen Wilson riding around the imaginary French city of Ennui on his bicycle, giving us a rather morbid view of the dreary streets and fetid canals.  This was fine by way of intro, but Wes chooses to make all his stories entirely reliant on the eccentric narrators.  

You need action to propel the stories, and sadly none comes, even when confronted by a fierce prison artist, as played by the incomparable Bencio del Toro.  There's nothing more than a growl from Moses Rosenthaler, intimating the beast within, before we see a still-life of a fight scene in which he protects his Concrete Masterpiece, mostly for the sake of his muse, the lovely Simone, a prison guard who also serves as his manager.  Adrian Brody came across more fiercely as the art collector determined to make a fortune off Moses.

Wes and Roman and Jason dug deep into their Thesauruses to come up with all the adjectives the writers use to embellish their stories.  So much so that you often feel lost on a tempestuous sea of words, as if drawn from Prospero's books.  Wes probably should have taken a lesson from Ernest Hemingway, and that is to write simply and clearly.  After all, Papa was a Midwesterner, who started out at The Kansas City Star.  Instead, Wes and his chums decide to laden their stories with flowery prose that is the last thing you would expect a Midwest audience, or any audience for that matter, to appreciate.

The one story that had some action was The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner, one Lt. Nescaffier.  Ostensibly a food story, Roebuck Wright, soon finds himself literally a part of a kidnapping with the Oriental chef concealing a poison in the radishes to foil the kidnappers, knowing that the commissioner's son doesn't eat radishes.  There really is no point of a spoiler alert, as you know the son won't be harmed, as the chase is literally made into a cartoon.  The real question is who does eat radishes?  Not that it matters as the story is more about Roebuck's incredible "typographic" memory than anything else.  He literally remembers everything he has written.

Revisions to a Manifesto was probably the most entertaining of the stories, just to see Timothee Chalamet's larger than life hair and the all too brief appearance of Christoph Waltz, but also the most frustrating.  Frances McDormand tells the story as Lucinda Krementz, mostly from a garret bed that she shares with the young revolutionary Zeffirelli. She decides to rewrite his manifesto due to its many spelling and grammatical errors, and soon finds herself reluctantly caught up in the Ennui student revolution.  There's a lot that goes on in this short story, which could have comprised a full movie in its own right, but sadly is reduced mostly to still shots, with little or nothing of the many characters revealed.

This is the problem with the movie as a whole. There is no one to identify with, let alone have any empathy for.  The characters remain flat, as if pulled directly from the pages of a fictitious dispatch, which you probably would have gotten more out of if it had been a picture book.  As it turns out, you can get it at amazon, even in hardback.

Another problem is that Wes loaded this film with actors from his past films and a few new faces to boot.  It was a virtual Who's Who of the film world with few getting more than one line, and some none at all.  I can't remember if Lea Sedoux said anything as the sultry prison guard, whose curvaceous figure seems to be mostly what Wes wanted her for.  I can't imagine as an actor that this is what you hoped for in a Wes Anderson movie.

It's really too bad because it could have been a whole lot better.  The Coen Brothers were able to pull off a Western anthology in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs that had far more emotional weight than this fluff piece.  No wonder Arthur Howitzer Jr. had a heart attack, having to edit all these narcissistic writers.  I suppose therein lies the droll humor to the movie, but it is probably something only Wes and his chums are able to get a laugh out of.  I'll try to watch it again in a few months time, but I don't expect to get anything more out of it.