She’s understandably intrigued by the young radical Zeffirelli B. Frances McDormand plays the movie’s Mavis Gallant-like Lucinda Krementz, who reports on the student protests of May 1968 in the mostly black-and-white middle segment. They consider “journalistic neutrality” to be a nonsense conceit, willfully injecting themselves into their own pieces. Today, journalists are expected to be moral, upstanding citizens with perfect grammar and even more impeccable ethics, but that couldn’t be less true of Howitzer’s crew.
He was a man of many maxims (among them “Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose” and “No crying”) who could spot and champion talent in unlikely form, even if it meant bailing out of jail someone he believed to be a nascent writer, like Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), a James Baldwin-esque dandy who recites every line of a wild-and-crazy kidnapping story by heart. Off the top, the obituary is that of erstwhile French Dispatch founder and publisher Arthur Howitzer Jr. Thus, the unconventional project succeeds in delivering that very particular hodgepodge pleasure of reading a well-curated issue from cover to cover. What does that mean exactly? Well, this is an anthology film, one that consists of “an obituary, a travel guide and three feature articles.” So while there’s no overarching narrative or overlap between segments, Anderson is quite clearly the author of all five - for there is no living filmmaker with a more recognizable visual signature, and every frame of “The French Dispatch” is unmistakably his.
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