Holly* and I saw French Dispatch this week (my first time back to the movies!!!) and I’m here with some thoughts.
Critically, reviews were … good? It’s rated 74% on rotten tomatoes, and the general sentiment is that it was fun to see Wes do maximalist to the max - but there was a lot crammed into 1hr 43 minutes. Some snippets from people who know a lot more about “cinema” than me:
NYT - A.O. Scott
Anderson isn’t really a polarizing figure; there isn’t much to argue about. He’s a taste you either enjoy or don’t, like cilantro or Campari. “The French Dispatch” is an herbarium of his preoccupations and enthusiasms, an anthology film laid out like a magazine, with a short front-of-the-book piece and three meaty features, all decked out with editorial bric-a-brac and a somber epilogue that may be the best part.
Roger-Ebert.com - Sheila O’Malley
"The French Dispatch" holds the audience at a remove, and is a stronger film for it. Watching Anderson follow his obsession to the outer limits (it's hard to imagine how much further he could go) is fascinating. The movie may be hard to explain, but it's very fun to watch. It's a fast-paced delirious movie about a very slow unchanging world.
The New Yorker - Anthony Lane
Even by Anderson’s standards, the crowd of performers is comically dense … 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.
What the people are saying (Google review):
My opinion?
Visually, it was everything and more. The aesthetics are a huge reason I’m drawn to Wes in the first place, and they delivered. The cast was STACKED (I almost lost my mind when Alex Lawther** made a cameo) - but it was kind of like we got a little from a lot of people, and there were so many characters that left me wanting more. Elisabeth Moss! Saoirse!
The storyline wasn’t my favorite of the Wes Canon, but I'm still really happy I saw it. I love a packed storyline, don't get me wrong, but this felt like it could have been split into four standalone movies. I’d love to see it again to absorb the things I missed the first time, but I don’t see myself reaching for this on a moody day the way I reach for the Darjeeling Limited or Tenenbaums.
I think articulates how I felt about it quite nicely:
Have you seen it? What’d you think?
*(remember our witch in residence / moodboard queen?)
** from one of my favorite flew-under-the-radar shows on Netflix
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