Berensen (Swinton) with a tormented painter (Benicio Del Toro). Roebuck Wright is paired with a precinct-house chef (Stephen Park) Lucinda Krementz (McDormand) with a rebellious student (Timothée Chalamet) J.K.L. Each feature is, in effect, a double portrait: of the writer at work on the story and of a charismatic, elusive central character, set against a busy backdrop of mayhem and intrigue. The shifts in tone from melancholy to antic are an Anderson signature, heightened by switches from black-and-white to color, from live action to animation, and from what could be the ’30s or ’40s to what might be the ’60s or ’70s.Īfter an introduction (with voice-over from Anjelica Huston) and a prose-poem tour of Ennui (conducted by Wilson on a bicycle), we settle into a stretch of what the real New Yorker liked to call “long fact” pieces. Really, though, he’s Bill Murray in a Wes Anderson film, which is to say the ideal grown-up, an embodiment of impish, saturnine charm and eccentric integrity.Īnd so on. Like Ross, Howitzer is from the western part of Middle America (Kansas, rather than Colorado), and like Shawn he’s a soft-spoken perfectionist. Its editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr., has a few things in common with Harold Ross and William Shawn, the men who together and sequentially established The New Yorker as a pinnacle of middlebrow sophistication in the decades before and after World War II.
#Norton ghost 15 purchase full
The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun is the full name of a weekly periodical that isn’t quite The New Yorker but also isn’t quite not The New Yorker. “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. He’s a taste you either enjoy or don’t, like cilantro or Campari. Anderson isn’t really a polarizing figure there isn’t much to argue about. “I possess a typographic memory,” he insists, and the distinction offers a clue about how Anderson’s mind works. When a character is credited, during a television interview, with having a photographic memory, he is quick to correct the record. The sound design of “The French Dispatch,” enlivened by Alexandre Desplat’s playful and knowing score, is punctuated by the scratching of pencils and the clacking of typewriter keys. Maybe that’s a strange thing to say about an artist with such a recognizable visual aesthetic, but Anderson’s meticulous pictures are themselves evidence of his bookishness. He might be the most passionately literary of living filmmakers, the one whose movies are most like books. Anderson has inscribed a billet-doux to The New Yorker in its mid-20th-century glory years that is, at the same time, an ardent, almost orgiastic paean to the pleasures of print. What “The French Dispatch” celebrates is something more specific than everyday newspapering and also something more capacious. Moral crusades are as alien to Anderson’s sensibility as drab khakis.
#Norton ghost 15 purchase movie
The movie is not Wes Anderson’s version of “ Spotlight,” in which humbly dressed reporters heroically take on power, injustice and corruption. Ever since it showed up in Cannes this past summer, “ The French Dispatch” has been described as “ a love letter to journalism.” This isn’t inaccurate - you love to see it when deadline scribblers are played by the likes of Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton - but it’s nonetheless a little misleading.