This movie made me spend a lot of time thinking about Wes Anderson’s childhood.
Can you picture him? Sitting in his room surrounded by copies of The New Yorker and independent comics and smoking clove cigarettes.
His only friend, a weird kid like him that he kind of hates. His first love – an older gal pal of his mom who didn’t quite break his heart.
Can you imagine the dioramas? Do you wonder how many shows – both puppet and shadow – that his parents must have sat through? I bet their critiques were brutal.
I think that boy, who was the definition of too smart for his own good, must have been terribly lonely.
By the way, I have no idea what Anderson’s childhood was like. He could have been a star athlete who was voted class president. But his movies suggest something else.
Anderson’s adulthood begins with the movies Bottle Rocket and then Rushmore. Then we get The Royal Tenenbaums which becomes a roaring success. It’s such a success that Wes Anderson continues to make what can only be described as Wes Anderson movies.
Like the Coen Brothers, his movies are so distinctive they are essentially their own genre.
What’s a Wes Anderson movie? Sharp characters full of dry wit. Emotional people and emotionally damaged people almost never show any emotion. Beautiful and perfect sets and costumes.
Twee.
I think he’s gotten better as he’s gone along and I think The French Dispatch may be his best work.
It’s set in France in a city called Ennui. That was a bit too twee for me but I’ll allow it.
It’s about journalists who discover life itself and then report it out to the world.
It’s about Bill Murray who plays the editor of the New Yorker style magazine and the father figure to a group of brilliant writers.
He gets to say things like, “Don’t cry in my office!”
And
“Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.”
It may be Anderson’s funniest movie. It’s certainly his most star-packed movie.
Everywhere you look another famous actor shows up to do something amazing and then gets off stage. I’m pretty sure there is one Oscar winner in it who has no lines.
Benicio Del Toro is in a lot of it but he mostly just growls. Tilda Swinton and Frances McDormand both get fun, meaty roles. And roles that you could only imagine being played by these two actresses.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Wright plays a fictional version of James Baldwin and steals every scene he gets.
One warning. The movie spends a decent amount of time in a painter’s studio with a nude model. Those of you with kids or parents should be aware.
IMDB tells me this is Anderson’s ninth film with Murray, his eighth with Owen Wilson, and his seventh with Jason Schwartzman.
Which seems to make it clear to me that while the boy may have been lonely the adult found his family.
Dark Highways 