Review: 'The French Dispatch' is a film of 4 quirky stories

Wes Anderson pays tribute to the imagined heyday of storied literary magazines like “The New Yorker” and “The Paris Review” in “The French Dispatch,” a stylized anthology film that's structured like a magazine

There’s a line that Bill Murray’s Harold Ross-like character Arthur Howitzer Jr, the editor of The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, says a few times in Wes Anderson’s new movie that I can’t stop thinking about. “Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose,” he gently advises his staff.

It’s clever, sure, and just familiar enough to make you wonder if it is some well-known writing advice. But what’s especially striking is that it's somehow both confident and self-deprecating —- a beautiful quip that’s full of insight and contradictions, not unlike Anderson films themselves. And it’s easy to wonder whether it’s a kind of window into Anderson’s mind, something he tells himself or was once told to make sense of his idiosyncratic aesthetic, which lately seems to have become a bit of a liability. For better or worse, Wes Anderson films always look, sound and feel like Wes Anderson films.

“The French Dispatch” is no exception, but because we’ve now been living with his films for 25 years and the most surface interpretation of his style has been misappropriated by dilettantes on Instagram, it’s become easy to write off. And perhaps there is something to the fact that fairly or not, some of the luster has dulled due to familiarity, but “ The French Dispatch ” remains a highly enjoyable, sophisticated and experimental ode to the romantic, and fictionalized, idea of the midcentury heyday of magazines like “The New Yorker” and “The Paris Review.”

This particular magazine’s reach is significantly more limited than that of its inspirations. The French Dispatch is a weekly insert of the Liberty Kansas Evening Sun. The real Liberty, Kansas, is a town with a population that has barely exceeded 250 in the past century and, more recently, has hovered closer to 100. This makes it all the more amusing that Murray’s character would bankroll this magazine out of France (in a fictional town called Ennui-sur-Blasé) with a staff of famous longform writers. But it’s a pursuit that will end with his death, and the final issue provides the structure for this anthology film.