The French Dispatch is bananas, and that’s what’s wonderful about it—when it is wonderful, which isn’t all the time. Wes Anderson’s almost indescribable new movie is a takeoff of a spoof of a parody of a tribute of a salute. And when you peel back the layers of irony and whimsy, you might find that, unexpectedly, The French Dispatch is a surprising celebration of Middle American mid-century cultural enthusiasm and its triumph over old-style European pretension.
The French Dispatch is about the assembly and contents of the final issue of a magazine very much like the New Yorker—only this fictional version is published in a French city called Ennui-sur-Blasé. As the movie begins, the year is 1975, and the editor and founder of The French Dispatch has died, leaving a will stipulating...