The New Yorker

I guess Wes Anderson really likes "The New Yorker," "The French Dispatch" being an anthology utterly in parodic homage of the highbrow publication. I assume like most, I'm not overly familiar with the magazine, although I have read it here and there and am more familiar with their film critics past and present, the likes of Pauline Kael and Richard Brody, so all the references seem obscure. Pity, because "The French Dispatch" is highly reflexive, to the point that it's arguably more about storytelling and the process of creation than it is about any actual story or creation. That seems to me a better thematic connection for the omnibus style than an event, location, or genre that these things often seem to revolve around. Even though there's some of that here, too, and the result also largely merely reinforces "The New Yorker" and Anderson's shared and consistent brand of dry whimsy and symmetrical style and with Anderson seeming to treat his crew and team of talented actors, many of them reoccurring throughout his oeuvre, with a parallel latitude to that given by Bill Murray's editor to his writers--just as long as "no crying" emotion is imparted. Some also seem to want to project their partisan polemics on journalism onto this, but such a pastiche isn't pointed enough for that.

The most obvious impersonation of a "The New Yorker" writer here is probably Jeffrey Wright doing a variation of James Baldwin, but it seems so off the mark, seemingly pointlessly making a mockery of the interesting activist and critic, including some solid analysis of films, of "I Am Not Your Negro" (2016), that I doubt there's much reward here for being in the know that Francis McDormand is doing Mavis Gallant in covering the 1968 student protests, or that Tilda Swinton is a conflation of art lecturer Rosamond Bernier and writer S.N. Behrman, the latter of whom profiled the art dealer Lord Duveen, for whom Adrien Brody's character is based. The main takeaway regardless seems to be to parody intellectualism, youthful revolutionaries, and abstract painting, respectively, and the sort of topics that might appeal to the middle-to-upper class clientele of such print media. Only the modern art episode works that well in such a respect to my mind, with Benicio del Toro giving the best of the deadpan performances--like his artist character's paintings being attributed emotions he doesn't actually convey or represent.

Anderson also sprinkles in references to French movies, but to its or my shame, or maybe a bit of both, the only one I grasped and that seemed rather spot on is also the weakest episode of the anthology, of Owen Wilson's cycling reporter, whose dreary and trite commentary on the supposed timelessness of a French city seems to be poking fun at Woody Allen's time-travelling "Midnight in Paris" (2011), which also stars Wilson.

Of more potential was that each story is not only framed as a story being told, written and read, but that the stories also are about artistic creation--even the transformation of the city landscape that Wilson's character comments upon. There's the paintings, the manifesto, and a chef all creating within the creations that are the episodes themselves. Swinton even lectures on the art within the story that she further presents by having written the article, and McDormand partly authors the manifesto that she's journalistically covering. Anderson attempts to elaborate upon all this creation further stylistically with the alterations between saturation and desaturation, some animation, and playing around with aspect ratios, with varied success.

From the plays-within-the-play of "Rushmore" (1998), to the documentary film-within-the-film of "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" (2004), and the stories about storytelling here with something of a variety format that not only resembles a magazine but a cinema of an earlier age that combined multiple films and genres for an evening's entertainment, Anderson is no stranger to the possibilities of reflexive filmmaking, but the potential here seems to be largely squandered, even if the results remain of some amusement.