Throughout film critic Matt Zoller Seitz’s interviews with Wes Anderson—those collected in The Wes Anderson Collection—discussions return numerous times to the idea of Anderson’s characters being world builders, individuals who must fabricate parts or all of their realities in order to cope, to make sense of themselves, and to find expression. From your Max Fishers to your Steve Zissous, the director’s oeuvre is full of ambitious, if deluded, heroes who must fabricate elaborate ecosystems in order to survive.

The characters in the idiomatic director’s latest, The French Dispatch, are no exception. They are writers, after all, and aren’t all writers world builders? But in another sense, these writers are also visitors in worlds not their own, third-person observers of and reporters on realities not of their creation. The subjects of their articles, they’re the more recognizably “Andersonian” world builders. Whether it is Benicio del Toro’s mentally disturbed Moses Rosenthaler miraculously building a mythos and a renown as an artist from within the walls of a prison, Timothée Chalamet’s wiry haired firebrand Zeffirelli leading a student revolution, or Mathieu Amalric’s police commissioner (commissaire) and his highly regimented stronghold.

Though it could be said that a great number of Anderson’s previous works, with their motley ensembles and many-pronged narratives, have “branched out” in fashions reminiscent of anthologies, The French Dispatch—the director’s tenth feature—is Anderson’s first anthology on paper. It has distinct sections, each of which stand independently, and each of which bear their own stylistic markers. One might find themselves searching for connective tissue across these three tales, aside from their all taking place in the fictional French city of Ennui and aside from their embrace of Anderson’s usual tics, but the charm of the “Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun” newspaper, clearly, is its embrace of independent and singular voices. And this is why the film’s outlying prologue segment, in which Owen Wilson as Herbsaint Sazerac takes us on a cycling tour of Ennui, feels a little unnecessary and indulgent on Anderson’s part—it works to establish settings and themes as if they will shape the course of the film, but none of the following segments seem to fall into this template.

But this, really, is where my critique of The French Dispatch ends, for what follows in the film is as exuberant, whimsical, and meticulous as anything Anderson has produced while also being chock full of an intoxicating mélange of new tricks. Undoubtedly spurned from the director’s fascination with reinventing European history, which we first saw in The Grand Budapest Hotel, his latest essentially expands on his self-fashioned universe and offers up three M. Gustave-reminiscent tales for the price of one. But whereas the orator and scribe for The Grand Budapest Hotel, “The Author,” was present in his story only as avid listener, the various journalists of The French Dispatch are themselves agents of their stories; provocateurs, or, at the very least, stimulated bystanders. Whether it is Tilda Swinton’s J.K.L. Berensen giving a spirited lecture on the unclassifiable work of Rosenthaler, Frances McDormand as Lucinda Krementz revising the impudent writing of Zeffirelli, or Jeffrey Wright’s Roebuck Wright sent careening down dark cobblestone streets to rescue the kidnapped commissioner’s son, journalism is, in this film, a vocation that takes one far beyond the confines of a desk and a typewriter.

Writing on Anderson in the introduction to Seitz’s book The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anne Washburn says, “His movies are not only about the love of the tale, but always, also, about the love of telling it.” This is perhaps most strongly exemplified in The French Dispatch, where Anderson spins his most variegated array of different stories and wears as many hats as possible. Hugo Guinness, Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman assist him in the writing department, and while the dialogue and the subject matter is undeniably Anderson, there is a real sense of collaboration in the script, of ideas being bounced back and forth, like they would be at newspaper publication. The idea of American characters working out of Europe, of “reverse-emigrating,” for example, is said to have come from Guinness.

By packing more stories into an under 2-hour runtime, Anderson also forces himself as a filmmaker—and, indeed, a storyteller—to be perhaps at his most inventive with his visual language. This isn’t the first Anderson film to make use of black and white photography, but black and white is certainly used here most extensively. It is adhered to like the newspaper journalist must adhere to black words on a white page, but when the stories begin to elucidate—when they illuminate and activate—they burst forth with some of Anderson’s most brilliant colours committed to screen. Unlike Moonrise Kingdom or Fantastic Mr. Fox, The French Dispatch is not tied to a tight colour palette, and this actually allows Anderson to be more expressive with his production choices. Similarly, this film also sees Anderson and his long-time cinematographer, Robert Yeoman, less tied to their favoured dolly shots, whip pans, and symmetrical compositions to better attune themselves to the rhythms that define the different stories. (You may even catch some very obviously handheld footage in this film, a rarity for the director.) Elsewhere, Anderson composes deliriously dense and complex frozen tableaus, complete with actors swaying slightly as they strain to remain still, and he even introduces hand-drawn 2D animation into his world for the first time.

Anderson’s players, of course, all carry with them the palpable giddiness that they always seem to convey when working on such an elaborate project from the director. While this film must surely encompass his largest ensemble, and while some actors’ appearances may flit by you before you even get a chance to register who they are, they are always treated with the director’s trademark consideration, always sketched in full and given breadth. Highlights include McDormand, intimidating in a new kind of way; Wright, who fits into Anderson’s world for the first time with a wonderful emotional grace; as well as an especially madcap and hilarious Adrien Brody. The assemblage around these players, the costumes, sets, and props, all clutter the frame in pleasingly aesthetic ways—Anderson’s diorama world has never been more appealing.

As is always the case with Anderson’s stories, the grandest, most extravagant world building being accomplished is on the part of the director himself. This is maybe why he has his share of detractors—some filmgoers no doubt sense the level of over-arching control Anderson has over his worlds, and they find it over-bearing, pretentious, and fabricated to the point where it takes them out of the verisimilitude of the films. Fair enough. But what this method of working demonstrates, time and time again, is that world building is a vital part of Anderson’s storytelling process, and that the more complete-feeling the world is, the more complete an affect it can have on his characters and on himself. The journalists of The French Dispatch can identify and properly tell a good story when they find one—they’ve built their careers on this aptitude—so it stands to reason that they too would want their the worlds of their stories to be rendered in the most complete, exhaustive, and rich fashion. In this way, in encapsulating every little detail, these stories become apart of them, and they apart of the stories—even if just a little part.

Review: "The French Dispatch" - News from the World in a Day