Howitzer Jr., based in part on New Yorker co-founder Harold Ross, was a stern man of few words - as the film goes on to show, since the obituary segment is used to frame the rest of the story in flashbacks - but Anderson depicts him with reverence, and with a solemn respect for a dying art. (Bill Murray), and for the paper he founded 50 years prior, the French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. The story begins with a 1975 obituary, both for editor Arthur Howitzer Jr.

In The French Dispatch, that history is an imaginary blend between America and France, the former being the place Anderson is from, and the latter a place you could easily imagine he wishes he were from (if his French New Wave-inspired early works are anything to go by). The film is Anderson’s ode to print journalism of the past, and it arrives with his familiar visual flourishes (with a few new ones added along the way), which dramatize both the thoughtfulness and the riveting energy of chronicling history as it unfolds. The interconnected anthology follows a fictitious American newspaper in an equally fictitious French small town, but its various segments take after real reporters and articles, mostly New Yorker pieces the director read in his teenage years. The French Dispatch is studded with stars and sprinkled with Wes Anderson’s signature pastels and storybook design, though like many of his works - recent films like The Grand Budapest Hotel and Isle of Dogs in particular - it uses that whimsical approach as a cushion for weightier and more melancholy themes.

French dis review