Books we know, but how do you capture a magazine on the screen? Not the easy way, but by making the viewing of it like an experience of reading it?
If you are Wes Anderson, you begin by fictionalising it to better capture its truth. You replicate its unique graphics and visual style. You introduce characters who are composites of the real writers, you switch narrative techniques, bring in self-conscious stagecraft, and infuse it all with an energy that makes everything jump off the screen.
Finally, you create an anthology both to pack in more and give everything breathing space. All this you do in loving homage to a magazine that has been a part of you since you were in the eleventh grade, as Anderson was when he first read it.
The magazine is The New Yorker , the movie is The French Dispatch with its surface story of the putting together of its final issue. The editor, played by Bill Murray is an amalgam of New Yorker’s first two editors, Harold Ross and William Shawn; Frances McDormand contains Lillian Ross and Janet Flannery. Others are identifiable too.
There are too tributes to French cinema (the setting is the fictional French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé). There is meta-fiction. Owen Wilson (playing the legendary Joseph Mitchell with a dash of Luc Sante) cycles around town describing its seamier side. In real life too, I read later, Wilson is an inveterate cyclist; Anderson was aware of this.
This is not a movie about a magazine, but a magazine in movie form. It is busy, moving at great speed while occasionally threatening to sink under the weight of its references. Does everything work? I am not sure. At one point, Murray tells a writer: “Make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” That sums up Anderson’s approach.
Anderson owns every issue of the New Yorker from the 1940s. He first fell in love with it when he picked up a copy at a library and read a piece by Ved Mehta. He tells us this in An Editor’s Burial , a book containing some of the articles that inspired the movie. Anderson calls it a “great big footnote.”
An Editor’s Burial brings together essays and reportage from James Thurber, Brendan Gill, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, Ved Mehta, Mavis Gallant, Janet Flanner, James Baldwin, A J Leibling, E B White - writers who changed magazine journalism and in some cases English literature itself.
The movie is so rich in detail, so varied in its references, so subtle in some places and so exaggerated in others that I came away from the screening at a London theatre promising myself I’d watch it again. I haven’t kept that promise yet, but this is a movie that should be seen at least twice for full enjoyment, and you can’t say that of too many productions.
The last time I felt this way was after The Grand Budapest Hotel, also by Wes Anderson. That promise I kept!
