Critics reviews

French Exit could be described as a depressive farce, though it’s never all that funny or moving. It aims for a slack, Wes Anderson–style melancholy and achieves it in scenes... But director Azazel Jacobs, working with a script Patrick deWitt adapted from his own 2018 novel, can’t quite commit to this tone of muted whimsy, and he sometimes seems downright impatient with it.

[M]ore absurdist elements push the film in the direction of farce, those lighter touches sometimes struggle to register as the film itself grows darker and sadder. But that’s the tricky balance Jacobs is trying to achieve in a classy chamber comedy that enjoys flirting with unpleasant black humor.

French Exit” exists in a world that might have sprung fully formed from the quirkiest recesses of Wes Anderson’s imagination, with drops of DNA from Whit Stillman’s WASP catalogue and Buñuel’s absurdism. The casually tossed-off insults, morbid asides, petty bon mots and arch affectations toe a treacherous line, constantly threatening to become insufferable. But a goofy strain of humble humanism manages to keep the self-consciously mannered house of cards from collapsing from its own pretensions.

As deWitt’s postmodern western novel The Sisters Brothers was a gift to Jacques Audiard, so French Exit was to Jacobs with its deceptively light descriptive prose and droll dialogue – Frances and Malcolm’s Noel Coward-like ripostes indicative of her delusional belief in her superiority and his disaffection.

“French Exit” exists within one of my favorite film subgenres—it’s a Sad, Rich, White People movie—but the characters are aware of their sorry state and eager to comment upon it wryly.

Too listless to fizz and too peculiar to win us over, “French Exit,” directed by Azazel Jacobs, is hampered by clockwork quirkiness and disaffected dialogue. What little there is of a plot — which includes multiple séances and a talking cat — doesn’t so much progress as coagulate around a coterie of eccentrics...

There’s a words-escape-me, tingling, offbeat something about this movie that reels you in — a something dimmed, maybe, by the brunt of the film so clearly guiding us toward this impression. Once it gets there, it doesn’t quite know where to go. Wit gives way to enervation.

“French Exit,” which steers Pfeiffer into the zone of lassitude and keeps her there, granting her more time and space to deliver (and to decorate) her lines than are required.

[T]his astonishingly awful tale of privileged, hateful rich people based on a book by Patrick deWitt... features garbage characters we’re supposed to love because they’re “quirky.” The entire affair is played as a whimsical symphony.

It’s an uneasy atonal misfire, an irritating collection of increasingly false moments, a thudding disappointment for those who managed to catch director Azazel Jacobs’ last film, the nuanced and knotty romantic drama The Lovers, a portrait of a marriage brought to life with specificity and acute observation. There’s none of that here, a defiantly unbelievable and drably directed heap of quirk that’s as overstuffed as it is underpowered, a head-scratching failure for all involved.

In French Exit’s first act, Jacobs and screenwriter Patrick DeWiit, adapting his own novel, come as close to capturing the tone of the screwball comedy as any modern filmmaker has, understanding that the genre is driven by an oxymoronic kind of sentimental amorality.

So much of “French Exit” borders on farce... While unexpected, pathos is perhaps the correct tone for such a group portrait, and Jacobs and deWitt temper the mounting absurdity... with just the right measure of melancholy as Frances burns through her final reserves.