Even by Wes Anderson standards, this is a very Wes Anderson concept. It appears “The French Dispatch” is a fictional French magazine (loosely based on The New Yorker) run by American expat fiction writers, and the movie serves as an anthology of their short stories. Your tolerance for this conceit probably depends on your tolerance for Anderson’s constructs, but there’s no denying the man’s ability to pull a cast together.
Benicio Del Toro, Frances McDormand, Jeffrey Wright, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Timothèe Chalamet, Léa Seydoux, Owen Wilson, Mathieu Amalric, Stephen Park and Bill Murray star, along with Elisabeth Moss, Liev Schreiber, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe, Saoirse Ronan, Christoph Waltz, Henry Winkler, Jason Schwartzman, Rupert Friend, Anjelica Huston and plenty more. Take a look.
Whew. Well, look. Maybe you like Wes Anderson. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you like some Wes Anderson movies and dislike others. But it’s difficult to not at least appreciate the craft and care put into some of these compositions, or the very droll joke of a French town named Ennui-sur-Blasē. Even the fact that the film’s full name is The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun reflects Anderson’s slavish devotion to his whole thing. That’s called knowing your lane, folks.
