The French Dispatch begins and ends with death. 

Specifically, the death of Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray), founder and editor of the eponymous newspaper, The French Dispatch. The publication began as a series of travelogues for the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, but eventually settled permanently in Ennui-sur-Blasé, a fictional city in France. The film opens with the beginning lines of Howitzer’s obituary, the first entry in the final issue of The Dispatch, which per Howitzer’s will is set to terminate after his death. What follows is a visualization of the last edition with four stories (and the stories and sub-stories within them) unfolding one after the other in the style of a Russian nesting doll. 

Described as a “love letter to journalists,” Anderson’s tenth film is an homage to The New Yorker whose notable contributors are featured in the film’s dedication. The final issue of The Dispatch takes inspiration from the publication and at times lifts directly from its storied history. In the first portion, a travelogue styled after The New Yorker’s “The Talk of the Town” segment, journalist Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson) takes us on a cycling tour of Ennui, showing via split-screen how it has changed over the past 250 years. Next up is “The Concrete Masterpiece” wherein art critic J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton) gives a public lecture on the career of Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio del Toro), a felon-turned-artistic sensation who paints abstract nude portraits of his muse, lover, and prison guardienne, Simone (Léa Seydoux). In “Revisions to a Manifesto,” Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand) writes about the protests of university students, a sequence that draws heavily from New Yorker writer Mavis Gallant’s coverage of the May ’68 protests in Montparnasse. Despite her claims of journalistic neutrality, Krementz eventually joins forces with protest leader and master chess player, Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet), and helps him write the movement’s manifesto with equal parts admiration and exasperation. Finally, “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner” is told as a segment of a TV talk show interview. The host asks food and culture critic Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), an amalgam of AJ Liebling and James Baldwin, to use his “typographic memory” to recite an article about a dinner with the police commissioner. Though Wright attends to review the culinary stylings of the lauded chef Lt. Nescaffier (Stephen Park), he finds himself entangled in a kidnapping and ransom that culminates in a shootout and, thrillingly, an animated car chase. 

Throughout, Anderson strikes a balance of tragedy and comedy characteristic of his oeuvre. Though other critics have complained that the standard themes of loss, death, and disconnection that cut through Anderson’s confectionary worlds don’t have as much bite in this film, they still leave a bitter taste in the mouth. Howitzer’s demise and, in turn, the dissolution of The Dispatch, casts a grim shadow over the film’s fanciful visuals and often-satirical tone, auguring the impending end of a golden era of journalism. As it is, Ennui is a world whose way of life feels on the brink of extinction: the paper has been terminated; the city’s jagged edges have been ironed out or bulldozed within the past 250 years; its inhabitants seem preemptively nostalgic for the past and dubious at best about the future. The film captures an undercurrent of discontentment—ennui, perhaps?—with modern life in the solitary lives of its central characters.

Rosenthaler, afflicted with a high-proof mouthwash addiction and a vague variety of madness, takes up art as an alternative to suicide. Even still, when he paints Simone, he is trying to capture someone who will never be his. Krementz, who considers relationships a hindrance to her writing, consistently denies her loneliness until she eventually relents: “I suppose I’m sort of sad.” Wright is a black, homosexual expatriate who cannot fully integrate into the foreign landscape of Ennui. At the emotional heights of these vignettes, Anderson uses his trademark symmetry to convey their alienation, centering each character in a mise-en-scène that feels too large, too empty, for them. As an audience member, you can see the gulf between these characters and the rest of the world. Anderson communicates this most effectively in “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner” in which the TV interviewer asks Wright why he always comes back to writing about food. In an uncharacteristically vulnerable manner, Wright replies, “I have so often shared the day’s glittering discoveries with”—the color scheme jumps from retro brights to black and white. Wright, now in an empty studio and seated by an empty chair, finishes, “No one at all.” 

If the beginning of that quote diagnoses an ailment, then what follows is its antidote: “But always, somewhere along the avenue or the boulevard: there was a table. Set for me…I chose this life. It’s the solitary feast that has been (very much like a comrade) my great comfort and fortification.” In the face of omnipresent melancholy, it is precisely these small comforts, these constant companions, that Anderson champions as remedies. Art—whether it be in the form of food, paintings, commercial pop music, or manifestos—is the thematic lynchpin of the film, a node for our disconnected characters. It is only through these outlets that we see them bridge the gap between themselves and the world around them. 

Anderson appears to say that the loneliness of existence can only be assuaged by art’s connecting thread. The Dispatch writers who struggle with their feelings of alienation in their respective vignettes conclude each sequence back at The Dispatch offices with Howitzer, working together to make the magazine. Their art, made in solitude, is also what brings them together. The film ends with the writers honoring Howitzer’s memory by sitting down with one another and writing his obituary collaboratively, phrase by phrase. In a film so concerned with disparate parts and containers, its true magic is the coming together of it all: the intertwining elements that combine to create stories, the voices that come together to create a magazine, the writers assembling in a disconnected world to create something that allows Howitzer to live on. 

If the film is the eponymous magazine, then Anderson is Howitzer, its editor who coddles and cultivates stories and all their crisscrossing components. He indulges their tangents, but always pinpoints their emotional cores. For example, when Wright turns in his article, a crime thriller filled with front-page-tier action, Howitzer insists that he include a cut interaction between himself and Nescaffier. In contrast to the kidnapping and all its ensuing thrills, the exchange is understated, but it captures the profound connection between two foreigners, two outsiders. “That’s the best part of the whole thing,” Howitzer says. “That’s the reason for it to be written.” Anderson, like Howitzer, finds the small, seemingly insignificant moments to be the ones that pack the greatest thematic punch. These slight but loaded scenes are more important than the rest of the facts, no matter how flashy they may be. It’s these small instances of connection that glance off one another, building the narrative purpose of the film.

Critics complain that the movie’s rampant pastiche and florid aesthetics subsume any attempts to convey a cohesive story with an emotional arc. For them, what makes the film so quintessentially Wes Anderson—the toneless affect of the characters, the intricately-constructed, pastel tableaux, the highly stylized cinematography—is what ultimately imposes the greatest barriers between the film and its viewers. While these claims have some weight, I can’t help but feel like the charge of style over substance misses the mark slightly. In a film like The French Dispatch, the style is the substance. The movie, shaped in the image of a magazine, embraces the parameters of its form. It is chock-full of artifice, a joyful exercise in all the myriad ways one can tell a story.  

More than just “a love letter” to journalism, The French Dispatch is a tribute to Anderson’s craft, a self-indulgent curio cabinet of his greatest obsessions. Is the resulting film a fantasy world? Yes, obviously, but, as Anderson’s student protesters suggest, sometimes you need to fight for the “right to defend [your] illusions.” Like the writers of The French Dispatch, Anderson created his art despite the looming death of not only print media but perhaps independent filmmaking as well. Having once described the film as “a confection,” Anderson offers this slightly saccharine film as comfort food for all of us who are also, in our own way, dying media.