Movie review: Michelle Pfeiffer leads a fine cast in 'French Exit' Moira Macdonald, The Seattle Times Patrick deWitt's delightful novel "French Exit," about an eccentric Manhattan widow and her grown son who cope with impending bankruptcy by fleeing to Paris, screamed to be made into a movie. When I reviewed the book in 2018, I imagined Meryl Streep and Paul Dano in the starring roles, and wrote that the film's tone surely "would be funny, quirky, unpredictable; its style would have a certain faded glamour, a winking je ne sais quoi." Three years later, here's the movie, and well, I was wrong.