The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun

Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch is a film so committed to aesthetic formalism and narrative detachment that its progressive elements emerge almost by accident. The ensemble cast includes actors of various ethnicities and a gender-balanced roster of journalists, though Anderson deploys them in service of his obsessive visual geometry rather than any particular statement about representation. The film contains youthful political upheaval and student riots as plot devices, but treats them with the same whimsical irony he applies to kidnappings and culinary drama. There is no sense that Anderson wishes us to feel urgency about these matters.

The film's relationship to its own political content is fundamentally one of aestheticization. Student revolutionaries and incarcerated artists appear as colorful narrative elements in an elaborate magazine layout rather than as vehicles for the filmmaker's social consciousness. Anderson's characteristic detachment, his refusal of emotional crescendos or moral clarity, works directly against the earnest advocacy that contemporary progressive sensibilities typically demand. A scene of civil unrest becomes another opportunity for perfectly composed frames and deadpan voice-over. The film celebrates journalism and the archive, but never suggests that journalism might need to change the world.

What rescues this from a score in the low teens is the film's genuine gender diversity in its narrative focus, its racially mixed casting without commentary, and the presence of a few thematic elements that touch on social consciousness without pursuing them. Jeffrey Wright's character, a chef who mediates a kidnapping, occupies narrative space with dignity. But these elements feel incidental to Anderson's true passion, which is the mise-en-scene of a fading publication and the nostalgic preservation of a certain cosmopolitan sensibility. The film is too clever and too committed to its own artifice to be read as a work of social advocacy.