THE FRENCH DISPATCH (B) - I am probably the ultimate niche customer for Wes Anderson's fussy storytelling, and even my patience is wearing a little thin. The best description for his latest star-studded adventure is "overstuffed."
I thoroughly enjoyed his homage to the New Yorker magazine of a bygone era, and in fact I laughed a lot, but this one too often is a classic example of style over substance -- even by Wes Anderson standards. One significant flaw here is the use of four sequential stories told in a vignette format. The first one is a very brief throat-clearer featuring Owen Wilson as a cyclist who sets the table about the magazine, The French Dispatch of the Liberty (Kansas) Sun, which, improbably, from the 1920s to the '70s, served as a foreign bureau based in the fictional town tweely named Ennui sur Blase.
The second, longer section features Benicio del Toro as a transformational artist who happens to be serving a murder sentence and employs his prison guard (Lea Seydoux) as his muse and nude model. Anderson frames this compelling story through a lecture given by Tilda Swinton, rocking a Margaret Thatcher wig and Barbara Walters vocal delivery. That story, for better and for worse, dwarfs the next two tales, rendering them mundane and more convoluted than necessary. In the next piece, we get Timothee Chalamet as a 1968 French student activist profiled by an older female reporter (Frances McDormand). This one has about as much oomph as Chalamet usually does and never gets off the ground. Finally, Anderson offers an inscrutable piece about a food writer (Jeffrey Wright) covering a private dinner with the police commissioner whose son gets kidnapped. Even the one-paragraph Wikipedia entry is difficult to follow (or care about).
By the end, the average viewer likely will be confused and annoyed (though probably not bored). (It also doesn't help that the female reporters in the other two vignettes sleep with their sources; post-war conventions or not, it's as icky as it is quaint.) But there are two pluses here: First, the cast is one of the finest ever assembled in one movie. Other cast members include: Bill Murray as the editor in chief, Jason Schwartzman, Elisabeth Moss, Lois Smith, Bob Balaban, Henry Winkler, Adrien Brody, Mathieu Amalric, Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber, Willem Dafoe, Saoirse Ronan and newcomer Lyna Khoudri. The problem is that these are mostly cameos, and all are blown off the screen by Del Toro and Seydoux. Second, Anderson's trademark detailed flourishes are still impressive -- I laughed out loud a bunch of times and constantly marveled at his creative inventions.
I would watch this a couple more times just to revel in the in-jokes and ingenuity, that unique knack Anderson has (and perfected in "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou") of creating a skewed world that can seem both silly and emotionally powerful at the same time. This is a gorgeous movie, with every inch of each frame fussed over in a way that no other director would have the time or the patience for. This is no throwaway farce. It has heart and passion. But it tries to do too much and, in a bid to impress, instead runs roughshod over the viewer. Too often, Anderson forgets that it's his job to simply convey a coherent narrative. (He also lacked such discipline in his last film, the animated "Isle of Dogs.")
Fans of the New Yorker certainly will get an extra kick out of the sly references to the iconic weekly, and might appreciate the fastidious fussiness. But too many others will be left exhausted, overwhelmed to the point of wondering, by the end of it, whether to care about any of these antics.
THE JERK (1979) (B) - Ah, the simpler, stupider waning days of the 1970s, when Steve Martin was a comedic phenomenon and crudely finding his way to Hollywood. Well before "Dumb and Dumber," Martin, two co-writers, and director Carl Reiner threw a bunch of dumb ideas together and just let Martin riff in this rags-to-riches story of a blithering idiot making his way through the world.
In assessing it 42 years later, it's not so much a question of whether this goofiness has aged well as it is a question of whether we have. Some of the gags are so inane that they elicit guilt-free laughs to this day. Launching from "I was born a poor black child" -- the gag is that Martin's Navin Johnson is so blinkered (a naif, as his name suggests) that he doesn't realize until adulthood that he had been adopted into a rural black family -- Martin goes on to crowd-surf in a sea of silliness. The greatest hits include Navin's pride in his "special purpose," the delicacy of "pizza in a cup," the evils of cat-juggling, "I'm picking out a thermos for you," "The new phone books are here!", Iron Balls McGinty, and the brilliant crescendo of Navin, with his pants around his ankles, pathetically gathering an armful of random items from his collapsed empire -- "... and that's ALL I need!" All the while, Martin's manic energy is complemented by a talented cast doubling down on the deadpan -- Bernadette Peters, M. Emmet Walsh, Mabel King, Bill Macy and Jackie Mason.
I have no idea how an adult in this day and age stumbling across this for the first time -- if that's even remotely likely -- would react to Martin's classic shtick two generations removed. "The Jerk" is still funny, but it also seems about as quaint now as the Three Stooges or Abbott & Costello seemed to us back in 1979. It can be difficult to recapture the complicated tightrope Martin walked back then as a breakout performer.
As the Onion AV Club (no relation) once put it, Martin at the time was "both a consummate entertainer and a glib, knowing parody of a consummate entertainer. He was at once a hammy populist with an uncanny, unprecedented feel for the tastes of a mass audience and a sly intellectual whose goofy shtick cunningly deconstructed stand-up comedy. Martin operated on multiple levels that allowed him to be the most popular comedian in the country, while at the same time being comedy’s most meta performer."
"The Jerk" is definitely wrapped in several thick layers of irony. But at its core, it's also just incredibly dumb fun.
BONUS TRACK
Here is our latest snapshot ranking of Wes Anderson films, from favorite to least favorite:
- The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
- The Royal Tenenbaums
- Rushmore
- The Grand Budapest Hotel
- The Fantastic Mr. Fox
- The Darjeeling Limited
- Bottle Rocket
- The French Dispatch
- Moonrise Kingdom
- Isle of Dogs
No comments:
Post a Comment