The Quirking Press 

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• Searchlight Pictures

For 25 years, Wes Anderson has created one of the most distinctive aesthetic sensibilities of any American filmmaker, in ways that often drive his detractors crazy. His meticulous set constructions and deadpan sense of humor can sometimes make it feel like he's building dollhouses rather than telling stories. But at his best—in works like The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Moonrise Kingdom—he can also add a vein of deep melancholy. That sensibility becomes the little piece of plastic tied to the end of a helium balloon that keeps it from floating away, and when it's missing, you can end up just staring upward as it disappears from sight.

The French Dispatch starts out with an omnibus premise that puts it at a bit of a disadvantage from the start. The prologue introduces us to the framing structure, through the obituary of Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray), an American expatriate publisher in France, providing a magazine supplement for a Kansas-based newspaper in the vaguely-mid-20th-century. The tales that follow are individual stories published in The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun: a brief history of the magazine's home base of Ennui-sur-Blasé by Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson); a profile of an incarcerated artist (Benicio Del Toro) by J.K.L. Berensen (Tilda Swinton); the tale of an uprising led by a student (Timothée Chalamet) as told by Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand); and Roebuck Wright's (Jeffrey Wright) attempted profile of a celebrated police chef (Stephen Park) that instead becomes the story of rescuing the kidnapped son of the police commissioner (Mathieu Amalric).

Individually, the stories deliver more than a few great comedic bits. The Owen Wilson segment serves up some of the best slapstick, though it's closely matched by an animated chase sequence in the Jeffrey Wright segment that winds up with a killer visual punchline. Anderson makes full use of his stock company of players—Murray, Wilson, Swinton, McDormand, Bob Balaban, Adrien Brody and more—who have a solid sense for how to make Anderson's writing sing, though none of them quite match the gusto with which Lois Smith, as a Midwestern art patroness, twangs out "This here's a fresco, t'weren't it?," or how Wright describes hunger in his writer character's florid prose as "dire caloric depletion."

From a storytelling standpoint, though, The French Dispatch moves so breathlessly through its individual pieces that they rarely have the opportunity to register as more than the sum of their oddball parts. Because the movie's framework involves narrative writing conveyed in visual form, Anderson frequently pauses or backtracks for brief biographical asides about his many, many characters, and while any one of those pieces might prompt a smile, they interrupt any kind of momentum those stories might be building towards an emotional point.

That leaves simply appreciating the detail with which Anderson builds his visual world—and at times, it feels like that might be enough. Many of the techniques he employs are familiar, like cutaway models of the environment in which a character is operating, or tracking shots through a number of connected rooms. Yet he also expands that notion with tableaux that wouldn't feel out of place as a single frame in his stop-motion features The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs, where he uses cotton to simulate a fire-extinguisher in mid-stream. These are artistic decisions that feel tailor-made for the era of home viewing, where the pause button might allow you to sit for several minutes with one of his compositions like a visitor to an art gallery.

Except that in a theatrical viewing, you're simply whisked along to the next moment, and the connective tissue remains thin on the verge of non-existence. One of the most striking individual moments involves conveying the passage of time by having Del Toro physically replace actor Tony Revolori, who's playing him as a younger man, as the camera watches. That's the kind of low-key emotional beat generally missing from The French Dispatch, even as Anderson makes a late stab at pulling the threads together with a solemn quote about the difficulties of living as an expatriate. When you're as focused as Anderson is here on building a world precisely the way you want it, the sadness of feeling out-of-place rings a little hollow.