The Elegant Containment of “The French Dispatch”

The new work from Wes Anderson, “The French Dispatch,” is a portmanteau film. That is to say, it contains a number of narratives—in this instance, four—that are neatly packed together, as if inside a suitcase. In truth, almost all Anderson’s movies, hitherto, have borne an air of packing; think of the boat in “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” (2004), the train carriages in “The Darjeeling Limited” (2007), or “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014), with its stacks of servants and guests. Elegant containment is the norm. Does Anderson like to journey with an actual portmanteau, plastered with old travel stickers and smelling richly of worn leather? I wouldn’t bet against it.

Multistory movies need something, even if it’s only the voice of a narrator, to link the various parts. In Julien Duvivier’s “Tales of Manhattan” (1942), say, a tailcoat is handed on from one section to the next. What binds together “The French Dispatch” is The French Dispatch, a fictional English-language magazine. It was, we are told, founded in 1925; produced in France, in the town of Ennui-sur-Blasé (which I strongly suspect of being fictional, too); and edited by a Midwestern gent named Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray), whose motto is “No crying.” Given that the end credits of the film pay specific tribute to Harold Ross and William Shawn, and also to writers such as Mavis Gallant, A. J. Liebling, and Lillian Ross, one can safely state that any resemblance to persons living or dead, or to publications that continue to flourish, is far from coincidental.

Each chunk of Anderson’s movie is a dramatization, so to speak, of an article that is submitted to The French Dispatch. Our first reporter is Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), who provides a tour d’horizon of Ennui-sur-Blasé, much of the touring being done on a bicycle. Then comes J. K. L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton), a vision in juicy orange. She lectures us, through prominent teeth, on the saga of Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro), whose roiling oils, painted during his imprisonment for homicide, triggered a quake in the art world. Third in line is Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), who is caught up in the “biological need for freedom” displayed by student protests—and, indeed, in the embrace of a young firebrand, Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet). There’s biology for you. Last and dandiest is Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), a doyen of the Tastes and Smells department, who is hot on the scent of cuisine gendarmique. Or, in plain terms, fuzz grub.

Even by Anderson’s standards, the crowd of performers is comically dense. Supporting roles go to Elisabeth Moss, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Saoirse Ronan, Edward Norton, Christoph Waltz, and Léa Seydoux. (The last two, like Jeffrey Wright, can currently be seen in “No Time to Die,” which seems to hail from another planet entirely.) Such density is a feature of the portmanteau: “Tales of Manhattan” was loaded with Rita Hayworth, Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, Charles Boyer, Paul Robeson, Edward G. Robinson, and Ginger Rogers. Now, that’s a cast. Yet something else arises from the profusion of “The French Dispatch.” Here, we realize, is a director who is more at ease with a flurry of pen-and-ink sketches than with the heft of a finished portrait. He has faith in the superior expressive powers of the sketch, plus the knack of arriving, after hard creative labor, at an illusion of the artless and the weightless. If I had to nominate a presiding spirit of this magazine to whom Anderson is indebted, I wouldn’t pick a writer at all. My vote would go to Saul Steinberg.

Exhibit A, should you wish to see this Steinbergian economy of wit at play, is one scene, or scenelet, in the jail-bound portion of the film. Moses—a painter incarnate, bearded and besmocked at his easel—faces a naked model by the name of Simone (Seydoux). She stands on a stool, one arm bent gracefully above her head. The atmosphere is wordless but not noiseless; “Shoosh,” she exclaims, dismissing him as he draws too near with his brush. Once the session is over, she hops down, nips behind a screen, and emerges fully clothed, in uniform, boots, and a cap. Ah, now we get it: Simone is Moses’s prison guard. We talk airily of an artist capturing somebody’s likeness, or essence, but here, in a beautiful twist, the captor is revealed as the captive, and the male gaze is placed under lock and key.

All of which is a mini-film unto itself, and also a loving nod, I’d guess, to “Le Modèle,” the final chapter in the greatest of all portmanteaux, Max Ophüls’s “Le Plaisir” (1952). If anything, Ophüls clung even more tightly to his source—a trio of tales by Maupassant—than Anderson does to this magazine. (Note to hungry pedants: The French Dispatch bears a typeface similar, though not identical, to the one that you are reading now.) It must be said, too, that the warmth of feeling that ascends from “Le Plaisir,” like incense, lies at a far remove from the glancing coolness in which the new movie is encased. It would be churlish to deny that “The French Dispatch” is a box of delights; Wright, in particular, is a joy as the sauntering hedonist. Equally, though, it would be negligent not to ask of Anderson, now more than ever: What would incite him to think outside the box?

Consider the upheavals that strew the movie’s third segment. Homage is being paid, incontestably, to Gallant’s two-part account of the Parisian riots which appeared in these pages in 1968. By and large, however, the chaos of that time is proffered onscreen in tableaux; the characters are studiously poised or, as is Anderson’s wont, photographed head on. When he presents a standoff between cops and angry youths as a literal chess match, with each side phoning through its next move, he does so not as a reactionary satire—a Swiftian snarl at these spoiled middle-class kids—but purely as a jeu d’esprit. Violence is tranquillized by jokes. I happen to admire anyone who can keep the ruckus of existence at arm’s length, for so long and in such style, but I can well imagine other viewers, more politically hands-on, bristling with exasperation, just as Zeffirelli bristles when, having composed a manifesto, he gives it to the correspondent for The French Dispatch. Rather than taking to the streets and brandishing his fervid text like a flag, she proceeds to proofread it. You say you want a revolution? Check your commas first.

Halcyon days, for anyone who liquefies at the sight of Timothée Chalamet. In “The French Dispatch,” he has a wraith of a mustache and a burst of insurrectionary hair, and claims to be “shy about my new muscles.” His what? The theme is maintained in “Dune,” in which Chalamet looks moony, bony, boyish, and bloodlessly pale. He plays the hero, Paul Atreides, whose messianic mission, foretold in dreary dreams, may or may not be to lead an oppressed people out of bondage. One of Paul’s initial duties is to undergo tuition in single combat, although, to be honest, he doesn’t need weapons training. He needs half a dozen lamb chops and a side of spinach.

The movie is adapted from Frank Herbert’s novel of the same name, published in 1965. The director is Denis Villeneuve, following boldly in the wake of David Lynch, whose film of the book, in 1984, turned into one of cinema’s most celebrated shipwrecks. The plot remains roughly the same. “The emperor of the known universe,” whoever he may be, dispatches Paul’s father, Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), and his clan to take over from the Harkonnens (a real bunch of bruisers) on the dun-colored planet of Arrakis, there to continue the vital harvesting of “spice.” This, allegedly, is the most valuable of all substances, for it aids interstellar travel. But is the assignment a privilege or a trap?

Even Herbert’s fans, of whom there are armies, would struggle to defend him as a natural namer. Paul comes from Caladan, which sounds like something you rub onto insect bites. Many of the characters are scarcely more than anagrams: Thufir Hawat, Gurney Halleck, Liet Kynes. As for Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa), he is not, as you might think, an official mascot of the potato industry but a beefy warrior—and, in the event, the best thing in the film. Momoa seems to sense that the story is wandering dazedly hither and thither, none too fast, and needs punching awake. Hence the bracing moment at which Duncan pulls off his gloves and enters a fight, bare-fisted, against impossible odds.

Despite the presence of actors such as Josh Brolin, Rebecca Ferguson, and, under a mound of evil blubber, Stellan Skarsgård, and notwithstanding the cool mechanical dragonflies that people zip around in, much is amiss in Villeneuve’s “Dune.” Of the emotional pressure that he exerted in “Arrival” (2016), little remains, and such power as the new film does possess is grounded in simple immensity: giant redoubts, gianter spacecraft, and, giantest of all, sandworms that plow through the desert and cry out to be caught by humongous early birds. One’s eye is at first dazzled, then sated, and eventually tired by this pitiless inflation of scale. And here’s the funny bit. On the same day that “Dune” is released in cinemas, it will also be available, thanks to HBO Max and the wisdom of Warner Bros., on your TV. Nice plan, guys. It’s like trying to stuff a cornfield into a cereal box. ♦