He may have stopped making films about his home state of Texas after Rushmore, but he never really abandoned the perspective of a kid dreaming about distant locales. The artificiality of Anderson’s work has always been a feature, not a bug. The town is the receptacle for year-abroad fantasies, a setting where even the crime (like the menacing gangs of choirboys roaming the streets) is delightful. It doesn’t pretend for a second that Ennui-sur-Blasé, the cutesily named town in which it takes place, is real. While Tenenbaums takes place in a construct of New York as built up in the head of a Texas teenager as he pored over back issues of The New Yorker, The French Dispatch is flat-out New Yorker fanfiction. This is more true than ever when it comes to the almost unbearably on-brand The French Dispatch, an anthology centered on a fictional magazine, a film that plays like a counterpart to The Royal Tenenbaums’ dog-eared literary fantasia. If you had a taste for his whole thing, Tenenbaums marked the point at which you would know.Īs someone who, with exceptions, usually does have a taste for Anderson’s work, I have come to accept that his movies cannot and should not be foisted on the resistant. In this film, the intricate, airless visual style and tone of wistful melancholy for which Anderson has become famous would really cohere. But it was Tenenbaums - a star-laden dramedy about a dysfunctional family of former child prodigies living in a fanciful Manhattan that stretches up to 375th Street - that would separate the fans from the haters. Then there was Rushmore, about the friendship between a teenage oddball played by Jason Schwartzman and a wealthy depressive played by Bill Murray, the Anderson film that even the Anderson averse admit to tolerating. There was his debut, Bottle Rocket, a lo-fi comedy about inept would-be criminals played by Luke and Owen Wilson that looks downright naturalistic compared with what would come after. Wes Anderson already had two features under his belt when The Royal Tenenbaums was released in 2001. © 2020 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporatio

Wes anderson the french dispatch