The French Dispatch (movie 2021) Wes Anderson, overbaked...

​There’s no director quite like Wes Anderson. Not only because his movies are so charmingly quirky and so pleasingly odd at their best, but also because no other movie looks like his. You can recognize his work in every single frame instantly. Each scene is so carefully crafted, so precision cut and framed and lighted, that it’s almost like a procession of designer postcards – from one of those stores that specializes in small expensive things no one ever really needs.
I’m a fan, I like Anderson’s work. Royal Tenenbaums is one of my all-time favorites. This one was easily my least favorite of his.
This movie is Anderson at his most indulgently precocious. The look-how-clever option.
It has every single Andersonian trademark from a spectacularly talented cast to the beautiful scenery and cinematography to yes, that famous quirk and yet…there’s something peculiarly tedious about this production.
I watched it in two evenings – easy enough to do since the movie is technically a triptych – and this ode to a small publisher’s coverage of Europe and all his off-beat reporters just didn’t engage me enough to care about separating a movie out like that or even be in any rush to get back to it.
The writing itself is so witty and funny and magnificently droll, and there’s a certain staged outrageness to the scenarios that is also appealing, but the overall impression if so over the top, so overdone, it’s like having too much of a good thing. And we’re not talking about things like money, which one might argue there’s never too much of; we’re talking about, like, cake. You can definitely have too much cake. Wes Anderson should have rationed his more. To continue with dessert metaphors, he kind of went for a kid in a bake shop approach, grabbing this and that and never stopping. Like a form of glut.
The movie can't even make up its mind about being black and white or in color, switching in between the two. It has a cast too large to properly utilize, resulting in very talented actors like Elizabeth Moss being essentially reduced to background. It has so many stories to tell that it talks over itself.
And so, with this serving of Anderson’s customary nostalgia schtick…it’s cute, it’s precious, it’s different than all the other movies out there, but it’s just too busy.
Maybe that’s why it’s done in thirds – so that you can regulate your cake intake. But that, of course, it’s entirely up to you.