17: Odd Jobs & The French Dispatch
Gareth Higgins on THE FRENCH DISPATCH
Although we’ve never met, I feel like I’ve been in conversation with Jeffrey Wright for a quarter of a century now. I first encountered him in Kansas City’s Tivoli cinema in the summer of 1996, watching Basquiat - Julian Schnabel’s dreamlike telling of the Haitian artist’s life. The movie circles a metaphor, gorgeous visually, deep in the heart, of a boy prince imprisoned in a tower, banging his crown off the inner walls to call for help. The local peasants at work in the fields hear the sound of the crown only as exquisite music, so while they look up from their toil, they do not run to help. It’s not the subtlest metaphor for the life of the tortured artist, but it does ring true - no pun intended. At the Tivoli, when the prince - Basquiat’s surrogate - cries for help, and the crescendo of the second movement of Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs filled the theatre, a man sitting alone in the front row flung his hands upwards, seeking heaven, I suppose, and speaking for all of us. I cared about the prince because I cared about Jean-Michel Basquiat, and it was Jeffrey Wright who made me care.
He has done this often - bringing tenderness and edge, and an extra ounce of wisdom to characters in works as diverse as Angels in America, Ang Lee’s underseen Civil War drama Ride With the Devil, and even as James Bond’s CIA brother Felix Leiter. I always feel both comfortable and challenged by his presence - like I’m near someone who respects me enough to be curious, but also with lots of things to teach me. And I want to listen.
Now, in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, Wright feels more like a conversation partner than ever. Anderson’s tenth feature is an anthology film in which three stories illustrate the heyday of the titular magazine, a tribute to the real-life heyday of The New Yorker, or at least the fantasies many of us hold of that real life. It’s the world of a crotchety yet beloved editor (played by Bill Murray, a crotchety and beloved actor), dogged reporters immersed in the story (with expenses generously reimbursed), high and low art in the same place, pomposity both inflated and pierced, and love. Yes - each of the three stories is ultimately about love. In movements for justice it’s the love of fellow humans, and the risk of having perhaps too much love for the movement, or giving too much of ourselves to it; in the world of artistic creativity and art-world commerce it’s love for the creative process, love between artists and their admirers, love for freedom and a path to experiencing freedom even while imprisoned; and in the final story, Jeffrey Wright’s story, love for the fact of living, no matter what it feels like.
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