Apt for a movie orbiting around a magazine, Wes Anderson’s much-delayed latest project The French Dispatch doesn’t tell one story but several of them: five, in fact. Four are dramatizations of an iconic article from the eponymous publication’s history that will be reprinted in the new issue — an issue to double as the magazine’s last. In the film’s frame story (its first), longtime editor-in-chief Arthur Horwitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray), dies at his desk from a heart attack at age 75. This dream boss, whose office’s “no crying” rule conceals his fierce and fatherly protection of his staffers, had stipulated in his will that this publication he founded some 50 years ago cease the moment he took his last breath. This magazine is as much a part of him as a spleen or an arm.
The first official tale in The French Dispatch is short — an appetizer of a story. It’s a fleet and funny tour through the quaint French town (the cutesily named Ennui-sur-Blasé) in which the magazine was originally conceived in 1925; it’s guided by a bicycling immersion journalist named Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson) who might broadly consider “street life” his beat. We then move to a character study of the talented and also psychopathic surrealist painter Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro), who reaches his creative peak while he’s carrying out a prison sentence for sawing off the heads of two bartenders on two separate occasions. “They had it coming,” he shrugs. Art critic J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton), sartorially resembling an orange hard candy, waxes rhapsodic not just about Rosenthaler’s unlikely rise but also his agitated relationships with his muse/guard (Léa Seydoux) and a fast-talking and fickle art dealer (a cracklingly funny Adrien Brody) who thinks he can make a fortune off this unlikely star.
Third in the issue and movie is Lucinda Krementz’s (Frances McDormand) profile of French student revolutionaries led by the wild-haired Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet), whose manifesto Krementz offers to edit and with whom Krementz will also have a short-lived fling. (Civil unrest is, of course, somehow rendered as almost fanciful by Anderson in this segment.) Not counting the obituary for Horwitzer that will close out this final edition of The French Dispatch, the grand finale is an all-over-the-place chronicle of a food review that unexpectedly evolves into a story of a big-deal kidnapping written by Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright). This protean reporter fondly considers Horwitzer to have seen his talent clearer than most other editors; his affection is touching and palpable.
Like most other anthology movies, The French Dispatch has a hard time avoiding the recurring problems the format consistently provokes: the difficulties of not only putting together comparably engaging vignettes but also reaching a logical end and leaving the audience with the feeling that it has watched something coherent as an affecting whole.
There won’t be anyone finishing The French Dispatch without the distinct impression that Anderson, who has long designed his movies as if they were an assembly line of treasure boxes to rifle through, is at the height of his visual command. You’re never looking at his assiduously designed tableaux with anything less than how-did-he-do-it wonder. They keep intact the gut instinct one feels watching most of his movies to pause the screen at almost any given time for an extra second or two to fully marvel at all the little details. Many people, myself included, will be hungry for a second viewing of The French Dispatch sooner rather than later to catch anything missed the first go around. These sensations, around for as long as Anderson has been making movies, still haven’t worn out their welcome. His films continue sticking out in the cinematic landscape like rainbows accenting overcast skies.
But if The French Dispatch represents a new high for Wes Anderson the Imagist (there are even dottings of animation), it also represents a nadir for the filmmaker as a dramatist. Though at least consistently funny, these short stories come across, from a dramatic standpoint, more as a series of doodles from a great artist than completely immersive paintings. They’re conceptually agreeable but missing a little color here, a little shading there. They lack fullness; they’re like a succession of half-considered poses. Real poignance isn’t achieved: it’s only angled at. True, the emotional ripple effects of Horwitzer’s death, Rosenthaler’s unrequited love for his stone-hearted muse, Krementz’s deep-seated loneliness, Wright’s societal alienation as a result of his race and homosexuality, are beautifully gestured at and enlivened by the performers. Anderson lovingly photographs shed tears and pained frowns, and the dialogue has flashes of insight. But the movie seems so much more concerned about what it’s going to do next visually that emotionality feels clipped before it can truly fly. It’s always a second priority. Anderson has found a sublime balance between his dedication to packaging and dramatically enriching storytelling plenty: 2002’s The Royal Tenenbaums and 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox in particular stand out as resoundingly powerful family dramedies as well as stylistic tours-de-force, for example.
The anthology format is particularly unkind to this sort of style-first flaw. When one reads or watches a short story, the expectation is that it will pack so much emotional or visceral punch that it can affect us as much as a tale given more time to breathe, expand on introduced ideas. Anderson gives us too much to look at and not enough to feel. It’s a sugar high of a movie — energizing but, eventually, enervating. The French Dispatch plays wonderfully as an aesthetic exploration of a subject Anderson clearly has affection for — in this case it’s pointedly the arguable golden years of The New Yorker and the personalities who shaped it. But it’s a generally superficial examination of the emotional lives of the writer characters helping draft this love letter of a movie. The actors are roundly terrific, at least. They seem happy riding on Anderson’s mercurial wavelength.
Employing a more straightforward newsroom comedy format á la Between the Lines (1977) or The Paper (1994) might have made The French Dispatch feel fuller, less exhaustingly busy. (You get to the end of the Wright story, worn out by this nonetheless impeccably designed movie, hoping that Anderson has no more to share.) The French Dispatch ultimately serves as both a high and a low: one of Anderson’s weakest films while also arguably being his most visually triumphant. That’s something my eyes are more than OK with, though: this duo doesn’t often have this much fun at the movies.
ALL OF TODD HAYNES’ MOVIES wrestle with the caprices of identity. Many specifically narrow in on pop musicians — that subset of people whose cultivated image after a certain point surpasses their authentic self in the public imagination. There was 1987’s Superstar, a short and experimental dramatization of the life of Karen Carpenter that starred Barbie dolls; 1998’s Velvet Goldmine, which busied itself with fictionalized versions of David Bowie, Marc Bolan, and other figures inseparable from the 1970s glam-rock scene; and 2007’s I’m Not There, a Bob Dylan “biopic” in which five actors and one actress portrayed the ever-evolving folk artist. None of these musician-centric films were that interested in being factually faithful biographies. They instead functioned like movie-length essays by Haynes in which he toyed with not just a given subject’s place in culture but also how they occupied his mind, how his engaged and probing eyes saw them.
Haynes’ newest movie treads both familiar and foreign ground for him. It again sees him exploring musicianship and identity and how fame can distort both as time wears on. And like Haynes’ other musician-focused movies, his subjectivity as a filmmaker is again as much at the forefront of the film as the people on whom he’s placing his focus. But Haynes is also exploring a new medium — documentary filmmaking — and is newly more dependent than ever on voices that aren’t solely his own to craft his story. (It’s an oral history, determinedly incorporating narrative viewpoints belonging exclusively to those who witnessed firsthand key parts of the overarching narrative to lend the film an immediacy.)
The movie is called The Velvet Underground. You might have guessed that it’s about the short-lived but extraordinarily influential 1960s avant-rock band of the same name. A tricky subject, to say the least. Three crucial members — primary frontperson Lou Reed, debut album guest-star Nico, and guitarist Sterling Morrison — aren’t alive anymore. There also doesn’t exist any orthodox footage of the band performing live at its creative peak. Members never did any video interviews together, either. Haynes subliminally assures us, though, that we’re in good hands — that he’s got it figured out. It doesn’t take long to believe in him.
Many music documentaries let the interviewees and the history they conjure speak for themselves. This often engenders a kind of flat, anonymous style of filmmaking that gives the impression that the director wanted to get out of the way. That’s good and fine a lot of the time; but you watch The Velvet Underground glad that Haynes avoided making the conventional-looking and -sounding kind of movie the documentary genre so often births.
Haynes doesn’t just want to present the facts, as offered by rare archival footage and recently conducted talking-head interviews with pivotal figures like Amy Taubin, Jonas Mekas, Moe Tucker, John Cale, and Mary Woronov. He wants the movie to additionally be a productive aesthetic experience, keeping the movie mostly in a split-screen(s) (in an obvious nod to early Velvets impresario Andy Warhol’s experimental 1966 film Chelsea Girls) that typically puts interviewees on one side and plentiful period stock/archival footage on another. The maneuver simply makes us watch more intently — your eyes never think to passively rest anywhere — but it also gives a false but persuasive sense of “being there” when the VU was first coming up. Carefully deployed soundtrack picks make everything further transportive.
The aesthetic bustle of Velvet Underground also helps us at once celebrate and interrogate the images we associate with the VU so often because of Warhol, that figure so associated with the band. He co-“produced” their first album, as well as its famous banana-loving cover artwork; the band’s members are frequently grouped in with members of Warhol’s so-called “Factory.” And most images we relate to them, he had a hand in crafting.
One of the most ingenious instances of Haynes’ visual canniness comes early in the film, when we’re getting into the worlds-apart backstories of Reed and Cale. Haynes puts on one side of the screen Warhol’s famous “screen tests” of the men — which is just them staring glassily at nothing in particular in front of a camera — and on the other visual ephemera that evoke the years before they fortuitously came together for this once-in-a-lifetime band.
Warhol’s screen tests — of which there are very many, starring scores of other celebrities — conspicuously preferenced image above the lives underneath. They stood in contrast to the typical screen test, a medium normally designed as an opportunity to see how natural someone seems in front of the camera to determine if they’re made of star material after all. Warhol, pushing against the norm, worked to alternately turn his subject nearly into an object. His screen tests all basically find the person in front of the lens sitting scarily still, or doing something extremely banal, making the subject paradoxically feel realer (you detect an ordinary person being put through an endurance test) and more unreal (like museum attractions). Haynes’ ingenious juxtaposing of the Cale and Reed screen tests with the substance of their lives gives the former a new complexity. It reminds us how many popular images are divorced from, and tend to reveal nothing of, the person they’re feeding off. The Velvet Underground helps demystify an iconic group often by collaborating constructively with the images that helped make them seem so mystifying in the first place.
Warhol was one force that contributed in making the Velvet Underground — whose still-unlike-most-else music about drugs, sex, debasement, really anything deemed taboo in their heyday — seem almost larger-than-life in their coolness, their unprecedented approach to their art. (This was, of course, further fueled by their crisp way of dressing — they almost always stood confident in all-black — and outward insouciance about everything.) Haynes’ movie both commemorates what made the group exciting musically and aesthetically while thoughtfully undermining the romanticization that can result from their singular, still-exciting radicalism and unforgettable image. The Velvet Underground satisfies as a stylish oral history (though one wishes it weren’t so quick about skimming through the band’s post-breakup years). But it’s also an exhilarating piece of moviemaking — as thrillingly dissatisfied with convention as the band with which it shares a name.
IF YOU’D TOLD ME A FEW YEARS AGO that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s first screenwriting reunion since 1997’s auspicious Good Will Hunting would be an often brutal and massively staged two-and-a-half-hour-long medieval epic with writing assistance from no less than Nicole Holofcener, the queen of low-key dramedies about white upper-middle-class malaise, I wouldn’t have believed you. Nor would I have anticipated the resulting movie being any good. But now that I’ve seen that resulting movie — directed by Ridley Scott and called The Last Duel — I admit being wrong thinking Damon, Affleck, Holofcener would be totally out of their element making something like this, and that I was wrong, too, in my prediction of the movie’s quality. The Last Duel shows these screenwriters in command; the movie is also one of the best I’ve seen this year.
Set in the late-1300s and based on a true story reported on in book form in 2004, The Last Duel is about a French knight’s (Damon) wife, Lady Marguerite (Jodie Comer), who is raped while home alone one afternoon by a sometimes-friend, sometimes-enemy of that knight (Adam Driver). When Marguerite bravely decides to come forward with rather than conceal her assault, a duel to the death, against her wishes, springs forth between the knight and the culprit to determine the veracity of her confession. (I guess God prefers to illuminate the truth by having someone succumb to what is probably going to be a nasty fatal blow first.)
In a style much compared to Akira Kurosawa’s landmark thriller Rashomon (1950), The Last Duel is composed of three chapters. Each dramatizes the perspective of one of these three figures — and each cleverly tweaks how the same situations unfolded from different worldviews — though some title card cleverness makes sure to clarify that it is only Marguerite’s account that can be dependably relied on as truth. (Though he doesn’t get a whole chapter dedicated to him, Affleck also plays a big role in the movie — he’s the piece-of-shit blonde-haired count who lords over the land and has authority over the knight and the rapist, who also is a knight — and it’s a great, frequently very funny performance.)
The Last Duel is a rewarding, muscularly acted (if marred by wobbly accent work), and dramatically rich movie. And it probes perceptively the power and gender dynamics of its era while sagely — though never didactically — guiding us to consider how they have mutated for the present tense. It’s a shame that The Last Duel’s name is currently mostly associated with failure, because the product itself is impressively mounted and considered. (It cost $100 million to make and has only, at the time of writing, only attracted some $17 million in box-office tickets.) Its financial tanking isn’t surprising: its subject matter, setting, and length are pretty uninviting for escapist-minded theatergoers choosier than ever because of, for one thing, a pandemic that still hasn’t said its final goodbyes. The Last Duel’s good reputation (critics love it) will probably help it out as time wears on, though. It’ll stick out years from now as the rare 2020s-era big-budget release that swatted away preexisting intellectual property for something more unexpected and daring. It might have tanked in the process, but it was a noble death.
Peterson Reviews 