THE
GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2014)
Directed by Wes Anderson
Fox Searchlight, 100 minutes, R (because of
totally innocent nudity, F-bombs, and paranoia!)
* * * *
Wes
Anderson’s latest, The Grand Budapest
Hotel, isn’t as funny as it’s billed, but it’s a delicious romp and perhaps
Anderson’s best realized film to date. Even when its humor falls flat, it’s
wildly inventive and off-kilter.
Set in the
mythical Alpine nation of Zubrowka, Grand
Budapest Hotel is essentially a caper film centering on the swishy Monsieur
Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), the concierge of an elegant hotel retreat/spa for
fading European aristocracy and shady characters posing as genteel. The year is
1932, and M. Gustave is breaking in a new lobby boy, Zero Moustafa (Tony
Revolori), an orphaned Indian lad in whom Gustave takes a shine. Are his
intentions paternal, philanthropic, or sexual? It’s one of the film’s
purposefully ambiguous questions; all we know for sure is that, though Gustave
set offs gaydar a mile away, he definitely beds aging dowagers such as Madame D
(Tilda Swinton). When she dies several days later and leaves an insipid but
precious painting to M. Gustave, heirs led by thug son Dimitri (Adrien Brody
channeling John Turtrurro) seeks to dispossess him. On a whim, Gustave and Zero steal the painting. Thus begins a
madcap set of misadventures in which baddies, including the psychotic Jopling
(Willem Dafoe), try to frame Gustave for Madame D’s murder and briefly jail him
before he, with Zero’s help, breaks out of prison. The subsequent chase takes Gustave
and Zero across the Alps by ski, snow machine, auto, train, and other forms of
conveyance. Gustave calls upon a secret network of other concierges to stay one
step ahead, whilst Zero longs merely to survive and marry Agatha (Saoirse
Ronan), a pastry chef’s daughter whose face is inexplicably marked by a stain
in the shape of Mexico. Military police—led by Chief Hackels (Edward Norton)–also
give chase against a backdrop in which war looms on the horizon. (The film is supposedly
set in the Alps, but its politics seem a pastiche of the pre-World War One Balkans.)
From this
you might deduce that the narrative is slight, and so it is. The film is really
a series of offbeat sketches held together loosely by a (sometimes imposed) narrative.
There are tasty cameos throughout (Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Harvey Keitel,
Jason Schwartman, Léa Seydoux) and the adjective ‘wacky’ probably best
describes the movie’s tone. There is no attempt whatsoever at realism; many of the
situations and hair-raising escapes are absurd, and the hotel and mountains are
often represented as hand-tinted color cutouts. Anderson washes his film in
those same washed out Instagram-like cartoonish colors—thereby adding to the
notion that we are: (a) witnessing the fading of a way of life, and (b) you
shouldn’t try to attach too much meaning to any of this. The film is also
bookended by a prologue and epilogue held in the now seedy Grand Budapest Hotel,
where a nerdy and reclusive young writer (Jude Law) seeks to prise the hotel’s
story from its aging proprietor, none other than Zero–played by F. Murray
Abraham, who looks about as Indian as a cannoli. Was the decision to cast
Murray Anderson having us on one last time, or just sloppy filmmaking? You
decide, but it is one of my reservations about the film.
The tone of Grand Budapest Hotel is evocative of Jean-Pierre
Jeunet projects (Delicatessen, Amélie,
City of Lost Children) but Anderson
lacks Jeunet’s narrative talent and his understanding of irony. (Anderson often
thinks that detached sarcasm is the same thing as irony.) I always enjoy Wes Anderson films; I’m yet to
declare one a masterpiece. In some ways his is classic slacker filmmaking—offbeat
and wild ideas that he thinks speak for themselves, even when they don’t. This
film, like his others, is a mix of creative and conventional. The
prison scenes, for example, are deliciously droll, but the chase sequences
evoke the cheap jokes we saw decades ago in Pink
Panther films. Nor does the omniscient narrator gambit rise to the level of
innovative filmmaking. It’s convenient and nothing else.
The Grand Budapest Hotel is, though,
visually entertaining and choked full of clever background jokes you need to
stay on your toes to see. (Pay attention to the newspapers that appear on
screen!) Fiennes is a hoot as Monsieur Gustave and Edward Norton chews whatever
scenery Fiennes leaves undigested. Ronan wafts through the movie as an odd
butterfly–often wordlessly strange, but always beguiling. Overall it’s a very
pleasant way to spend 100 minutes–just don’t expect a masterpiece; Wes Anderson
still has some growing up to do.
Rob Weir
Postscript: Need more proof that the
ratings system is a farce? This got an R for brief frontal nudity that’s no
more naughty than an unruly school child, and I’ll bet that same kid drops more
F-bombs as well. Titanic got a PG-13.
Is that because Kate Winslet’s breasts are British and don’t count?
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