Review of The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun (2021) by Jluis_001 — 06 Nov 2021

Asking Wes Anderson to change his style at this point in his career is just ridiculous.

It's not unjustifiable of course, but for a film director, more than anything an artist, you can innovate and evolve without changing your way.

And even with the things I enjoyed about The French Dispatch, and it pains me to say so, Wes Anderson has fallen into notorious creative indulgence.

Clearly his style is already something that he makes in an automated way, but that also means that he too has put aside any attempt to do something that could shake his formula.

Anderson has never been a director who has put much emphasis on narrative, but at least his films were brimming with humor, grace and wit.

The French Dispatch feels like a film to which he paid the utmost attention to all visual details, but it populated his world with insubstantial, bland, and inconsequential characters. Same goes for all the performances.

At the end of any of his previous works, I always took a favorite character with me. On this one I just couldn't.

The French Dispatch is a lot of style and hardly any substance.

It's all Wes Anderson, but for the first time it feels like an Anderson lacking in creativeness and insight.

He's like a magician who has exhausted his repertoire. The time has come to learn new tricks.