The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun: On Deadline

It’s well known that Anderson is something of an obsessive about the New Yorker, that he lives part-time in France, and that the movie’s eponymous magazine is loosely, comically modeled on the storied periodical. The end credits even include, essentially, footnotes—a list of writers, editors, and subjects from the magazine’s classic era who inspired the film. Some are models for characters whom he lovingly parodies, and others are named there, he has said, “for defining the voice and tone of the magazine.” The movie itself, an anthology of short films, is built like a magazine—in the form of the final issue of The French Dispatch, with an obituary for Howitzer, a brief travelogue, and three longer stories. All of its segments are straightforward in their purpose but dazzlingly intricate in their construction—foremost, in developing the literary and the dramatic voices of their fictitious writers, who are also central characters in their own narratives.

That notion hints at one of the key sources for what is, in effect, the journalistic death drive of The French Dispatch—and for Anderson’s enduring affinity for the New Yorker. I write for the New Yorker; as a film critic, I’ve never gone anywhere more dangerous than Twitter. But the magazine’s nonfiction pieces, by contrast with the more formal and codified journalism of newspapers, are largely written in the first person, featuring writer-protagonists who aren’t self-effacing observers but rather overt participants in the events that they’re witnessing and writing about. Journalists everywhere face dangers, but newspaper reporters generally describe the dangers that they observe; in the New Yorker, reporters describe what they experience, and their subjective responses, including their emotional ones, are inseparable from the events in which they are engaged participants. The history of the New Yorker can indeed be seen as a primordial literary version of cinema verité—which, contrary to the misguided myth, isn’t the detached recording of events by unobtrusive filmmakers but, rather, the audiovisual account of a unified field of action in which the filmmakers are vigorously involved, with their self-acknowledgment providing an objective trace of their subjectivity, the open recognition of their participation.

That’s how the reporting in The French Dispatch—which is to say, in the magazine The French Dispatch—is done: by journalists inside the stories, facing the same dangers that their subjects do. A writer named Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), who makes his way around town on a bike, is based loosely on Joseph Mitchell, who, from 1933 to 1964, wrote for the New Yorker about his immersion in the city’s so-called low life of working and nonworking people, eccentrics and their foibles (and who, famously, stayed on staff and came to the office until his death, in 1996, without publishing anything more). Sazerac offers the equivalent of an entry in the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section, except the town he’s talking about isn’t New York—Howitzer, an expatriate, established The French Dispatch (formally The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun) in the (obviously) fictitious French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. Sazerac bicycles through its run-down districts in order to fill his travelogue with characters whom Howitzer derides as “pickpockets and prostitutes” and Sazerac embraces: “These are my people” (such as a notorious gang of violent choirboys who harry him off his bike). Even dangers of cinematic form loom comedically before him: while biking in traffic, Sazerac turns his head to address the camera and falls into a manhole.

Each of the film’s three main sections is the work of a different fictitious writer; like Sazerac, they deliver their stories in voice-over commentary as the drama depicts the action they describe—and in which they take part. (That’s why Anderson’s tales of these journalists—of their stories, of how they get their stories, and of how they tell those stories—are so intricately multilayered.) The danger that they face comes in fields where it’s hardly expected—art, politics, and cuisine. Well, maybe in politics it’s to be expected, but the dangers there, as in all three stories, aren’t limited to violence; the reporters’ existential risks also enfold the other great drive, sex. In the art world, a writer named J. K. L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton), modeled on Rosamond Bernier (an art connoisseur who delivered a celebrated series of lectures at the Metropolitan Museum from 1971 through 2008 and was profiled in the New Yorker in 1977 by Calvin Tomkins), reports on the creation and acquisition of an unlikely work of art under unlikely circumstances.

The artist, Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro), is in prison, convicted of two murders (one he claims was an accident, the other self-defense). His artistic vocation is rekindled under the harsh but devoted authority of a prison guard (Léa Seydoux) who’s both his model and his lover; his vision is realized in a monumental work of genius and chutzpah; and his name is established through the schemes of an art dealer (Adrien Brody) that lead to a deadly prison riot—filmed by Anderson using a technique of his own, an elaborate freeze-frame diorama that combines with live action in a virtually animated ballet of brutality. As for Berensen, she works for the collector who acquired Rosenthaler’s masterwork (so much for journalistic objectivity), and she fights physically to defend herself in the riot. In telling the story onstage decades later, she incidentally discloses having had an affair with the artist, and in order to write the piece, she needs to rekindle (through methods I won’t spoil) the spirit of that romance.

There’s a similar twist in the second story, a giddily refracted version of France’s student uprisings of May 1968. There, a reporter named Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), based largely on Mavis Gallant (a Canadian writer who lived in Paris, published more than a hundred short stories in the New Yorker, and also wrote nonfiction dispatches from her adoptive city, including on the 1968 protests) helps a young protest leader (Timothée Chalamet) write his manifesto while also having an affair with him. (In this episode, the relationship, along with the very notion of journalist objectivity, becomes a subject of open debate.) The stakes of political power are intrinsically high, and the perils faced by the protesters are fearsome, but there’s another kind of danger that Krementz, who’s not one of the activists, faces: guilt, the sense of responsibility for the threats faced by others, for whatever she may regret in the outcome of events that, for better or worse, she had a hand in shaping.

What Anderson makes clear, with a cinematic exuberance of invention that giddily masks its earnest subjects, is that such journalistic participation isn’t innocent—it’s as risky ethically and morally as physically. In these two stories, Anderson is himself playing riskily with a noxious and stubborn stereotype, the idea that a female journalist may get sexually involved with a subject for the sake of a story. The risk is that his film will be misinterpreted. The two female reporters in The French Dispatch have romantic relationships for one reason only—their desire—and, far from using sex to leverage access and fudge the hard work of journalism, they’re open about their private life and its role in the experiences and the events that they’re reporting on.

The third story, in the magazine’s Tastes and Smells section, is centered on Roebuck Wright (played by Jeffrey Wright), a food writer of exquisite sensibility who is as discerning regarding the social order as regarding the pleasures of the table. Anderson’s conception of this character is one of his most distinctive and surprising inspirations: Roebuck Wright is a mash-up of James Baldwin and A. J. Liebling, who’d both lived in Paris, albeit under drastically different circumstances. Baldwin, whose groundbreaking essay “Letter from a Region in My Mind” was published in the New Yorker in 1962, had lived in Paris in the 1950s, in dire poverty, while, as a gay man, facing the threat of arrest, and, as a Black person, acutely perceiving France’s colonialist racism. As for Liebling, who wrote for the magazine from 1935 until his death, in 1963, he had lived in Paris in the 1920s as a student with an allowance from his wealthy parents, and he recounted his culinary adventures there in the classic 1962 book Between Meals. Roebuck Wright, a gay Black man, had been living meagerly in France and enduring persecution for his sexuality when (no spoilers) he started writing for The French Dispatch.

In this segment, Roebuck (I’ll call him that to distinguish him from the actor playing the role) is reporting on a very particular sort of cuisine, police cuisine (food especially prepared in station houses for officers to eat while on duty), which embroils him in a real-time crime story (part of which Anderson films as animation, in the rectilinear style of the stark early-sixties Dick Tracy TV cartoon series). It’s a grim, violent, tense, and mortal tale that Roebuck recounts, years later, on a TV talk show (stylishly parodied, from the sets and the attire to the commercial breaks). This high-stakes adventure gets intertwined with a tragic vision of outsiderness, inevitably including the story of how he came to write for The French Dispatch—involving his arrest for daring to “love the wrong way” and Howitzer’s role in helping to free him. The combination of the force of law, the menace of gangsters, the pursuit of a unique culinary aesthetic, and a sense of exile, along with a profound and passionate sense of literary craft and an elegant personal style to match, makes Roebuck Wright’s story one of Anderson’s most exemplary creations.