The French Dispatch

One of the worst half-movies I’ve ever seen. How bad is it? I watched, stopped watching about a third of the way through, later went back and tried to finish watching it, and had to stop watching it all over again, getting no further than halfway through. Hence, worst half-movie. The second half could rival Casablanca for all I will ever know, but I saw more than enough to make this call. The performances are dreadful all around, the script is an unfunny pastiche of unrelated and uninteresting vignettes, director Wes Anderson’s penchant for meticulous framing and visual design goes far overboard (he can’t even settle on an aspect ratio), and his usual wit—always in danger of falling too far into preciousness—is either well past the limits of tolerable or just outright absent. And all of the above comes from a viewer who typically counts himself as a fan. The over self-indulgence here is just too much, so much so that this can’t even count as a noble failure—it’s simply a disaster, and a waste of everyone’s time. It had better be back to simplicity and honest effort for this auteur, or else this misstep could signal a career that has reached its lovingly crafted denouement.