Over the last twenty years, writer-director-auteur Wes Anderson has built something quite odd in Hollywood. We don’t just mean his deeply unique music-box films, which are themselves ornate, unusual and thoroughly offbeat by commercial standards. Rather, it’s the repertory company he’s established within the confines of the Hollywood system: a revolving troupe of actors who are more than happy to keep returning to help him achieve his singular vision in film after quirky film. He’s reached his zenith with The Grand Budapest Hotel, an unmistakably Andersonian re-imagination of old-world Europe – with all its romanticised cultural mores and traditions – on the cusp of a devastating war.
In the late 1960s, an Author (played by Tom Wilkinson in the present and Jude Law in the past) visits the fading Grand Budapest Hotel – an establishment gone completely to seed, with a limited rota of guests. There, he meets Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), the Hotel`s eccentric owner, and is regaled by tales of the Hotel`s glory days. As a young, impressionable lobby boy (Tony Revolori), Zero becomes the apprentice of the legendary M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), a flamboyantly devoted concierge of the old school whose involvement with his elderly, female clientele – specifically Madame D. (Tilda Swinton) – will soon kick off an adventure of epic proportions. Mixed in with a disputed will, a stolen painting, a jailbreak and an encroaching military presence is a healthy nostalgia for a world that, perhaps, never really existed at all.
Anderson`s critics have long complained of the deliberate archness of his stories and characters – they`re so meticulously constructed and so resolutely strange that it`s hard to connect with them on any kind of true emotional level. Ironically, it`s only his stop-motion animation feature, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, that managed to elude such criticisms, largely because the family of foxes at the heart of the tale were so recognisably human.
He again performs a quiet magic of that order with The Grand Budapest Hotel, a sugar-light confection on the surface, but one with a darker, more historically grounded undertow. Much of the film unfolds in the key of a carnival: zippy, fresh and chirpy. But within his fictional Eastern European state of Zubrowka, Anderson conjures up the chilling spectre of Nazism – even if the swastika has been replaced with a pair of lightning bolts and the officers are given a more human face in the form of Inspector Henckels (Edward Norton).
As a result, the film hits upon quite a few bittersweet grace notes, emotional connections that are often lost in the tumult of oddities that make up a typical Anderson film. Here, the larger-than-life Gustave isn`t merely a bundle of quirks and tics: scratch beneath his fey, heavily-perfumed exterior, and you`ll find a man with a heart full of honour and humour. He may be, strictly speaking, a gigolo profiting from the loneliness of elderly ladies, but he genuinely believes that he`s giving them the courtly companionship and love they all deserve. The relationship between Gustave and Zero is also wonderfully crafted: an unusual father-son bond forged amidst their hijinks and capers.
The cast of The Grand Budapest Hotel is, of course, delightful. Fiennes, a brand new addition to Anderson`s troupe, delivers the funniest, warmest performance of his dignified career, demonstrating a comic flair so sharp that it practically slices its way off the screen. Revolori makes a charming cinematic debut as the poker-faced Zero, striking up a sweet chemistry with Saoirse Ronan, who plays his brave and bold love interest Agatha. The rest of Anderson`s repertory company gleefully pop up throughout the film: Adrien Brody as Madame D`s villainous son; Willem Dafoe as his ominous henchman; Jason Schwartzman as Gustave`s incompetent successor, a generation or two down the line – to name but a few.
As is now par for the course in an Anderson film, the production design on The Grand Budapest Hotel is outstanding and incredibly inventive. With his trademark hand-crafted visual effects (hotels and funiculars rendered in model form), Anderson lends a quaint, creaky charm to the entire film. It would be easy to get completely distracted by his snow-washed vision of a bygone era, if not for the fact that his characters – who plummet down ski slopes or dash across moonlit rooftops – are such fun to be around.
It`s easy to complain about some of the film`s failings, most of which are characteristic of Anderson`s entire oeuvre anyway. It`sso decidely odd that it`s sometimes hard to view it as anything but a curio. At points, the film drags a little, quite unable to consistently maintain a swift, sure rhythm. But those are minor points in what feels like quite a major work. The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson at his most assured and accessible: it`s a film that compromises none of its creator`s unique movie-making ideas and values and, in fact, goes quite a long way in communicating them to a far wider audience.
SUMMARY: As quaint and quirky as the rest of Anderson`s films, but made considerably more accessible with lashings of rich emotion and sublime comedy.
RATING: 4 out of 5 stars
Shawne Wang