The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun

If you like Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, perhaps you feel, like me, that you also need to apologize for liking it. It's so overtly stylized, so fussy and fastidious, so carefully made, so fucking cute that it feels like liking it is saying that I like all of Anderson's mannerisms, or that I pretend to be getting all of his (obviously myriad) inside jokes and odd sense of humor.

I definitely don't get all of the little jokes in The French Dispatch, but I did think this movie was funny in several excellent places – the Owen Wilson and Tilda Swinton sections, especially, I found hilarious, and the movie begins with them, so it sets a certain tone.

The conceit is charming: the opening tells us that the movie will be a kind of visual representation of a literary magazine: some editorial comment, one travelogue, three stories, and a final section of back matter. The movie was made in Angoulême but is set in the fictional French city of Ennui-sur-Blasé, already a hilarious name. The film, however, is anything but boring. There is a story of an incarcerated painter and his prison-guard muse – starring Benicio Del Toro, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, and Adrien Brody – and one of a student protest in the 1960s, with Timothée Chalamet and Frances McDormand, and finally one with a chef (hilariously named Nescaffier), a police chief, and his kidnapped son, starring Jeffrey Wright, Stephen Park, and Mathieu Amalric. The travelogue section stars Owen Wilson as Herbsaint Sazerac (these names!) in a farcical opening passage.

The French Dispatch does not offer non-stop hilarity like The Grand Budapest Hotel. After the first two stories, this becomes a much more somber film. Both the Frances McDormand section and the Jeffrey Wright section, though they have their silly bits, to be sure, are about regret and getting old. They're about memory and forgetting and loss and frustration. I liked the Wright section especially.

This is also a film about writing. It's dedicated to the short story writers and foreign correspondents who worked for magazines like The French Dispatch, and the closing of the magazine (which is announced in the film's first few minutes) stands in for the disappearance of these kinds of publications today. The movie is dedicated to a long list of these writers, and it's obvious that Jeffrey Wright is playing a kind of version of one of them – James Baldwin. But what the Wright section really hit home for me was a kind of loneliness, the difficulty of putting things into words for others, of judging what's important and what isn't, of experiencing what you experience and then somehow channeling that into language so that other people can have a different experience. The McDormand section and the Wright section both have an underlying melancholy about being a writer, trying to stay objective or separate from the story, and needing to do the work more than you need to live your own life – a kind of slow sadness of working to tell other people's stories.

What's sort of wonderful in a Wes Anderson picture is that everyone in it is so famous, so that this question of whose story is important, who has stories that might be worth sharing, is easily answerable. It's apparent on the very surface of the film that there are rich stories within so many of them. When Larry Pine or Lois Smith or Bob Balaban or Henry Winkler... or Saoirse Ronan or Willem Dafoe or Elisabeth Moss or Christoph Waltz or Edward Norton or Cécile de France appear in tiny parts, it is very apparent that there are stories hidden in each of these characters. They only need reporting.

In any case, The French Dispatch is complex and rich, and I enjoyed myself a great deal. It is fussy and mannered and overtly (almost embarrassingly) theatrical. But it has lots to say.

The paintings are by Sandro Kopp.