Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel is a joy to watch.
There's probably other, better opening review paragraphs that would give you context into how the movie was made, and plug it into some sort of higher-order chronology of Anderson's filmography (which has now officially tipped over into "prolific").
Fox Searchlight PicturesBut actually watching the movie trumps all those concerns, especially with Grand Budapest—precisely because this is perhaps the most narratively involuted film that Anderson has crafted to date.
I'll try and present this as clearly as possible: the film opens with a girl reading a book, titled The Grand Budapest Hotel (Layer 1). TGBH is, within the universe of the film, a book written by the unnamed Author, played by Tom Wilkinson (Layer 2). Tom Wilkinson then recounts his visit as a young man to the bi-eponymous Grand Budapest Hotel, his younger self portrayed by Jude Law—this is Layer 3. Jude Law's character encounters the notoriously mysterious Mr. Mustafa (F. Murray Abraham), who then recounts to Law how he came to run the hotel—back when he was known only as Zero (Tony Revolori), and worked for the concierge-savant Mr. Gustave (Ralph Finnes)—Layer 4.
Generally, the more "meta" a narrative is—that is, the more layered, convoluted, self-aware of its own fictitiousness—the more self-indulgent the movie seems. But Grand Budapest is none of those things. It's somehow relentlessly clear (somehow the above paragraph makes much more intuitive sense when you watch the movie, not less), beautifully stylized, wonderfully executed. It's hard to explain in non-hyperbolic terms why this is such an achievement.
Perhaps the clearest explanation is that The Grand Budapest Hotel feels like the first film in years whose formal intricacies complement its content, rather than compose it. In other words: all the fancy stuff Anderson does behind the camera—the divisive stuff that I felt was almost gratuitous in Moonrise Kingdom, the meticulous self-aware artsy-ness of the whole endeavor—actually serves the story he wants to tell, not the other way around.
The first thing I heard about the movie that made my ears perk up was that the different timelines would be shot in different aspect ratios (most prominently different in Mustafa's narrative, where the camera resembles an Instagram-like square), signaling to the audience when what ishappening where. I suspected this would be just a distracting trick, or something that's just "kind of neat."
Martin Scali / Fox Searchlight PicturesBut instead of just doling out nice tricks to make the audience feel smart, Anderson has reasons for doing what he does. Each layer of the narrative succumbs to an Inception-like stylization the further down you go, starting with the fairly realistic Girl in the opening scene, progressing down to Mustafa's memory.
All of that is rendered in vivid reds and purples. Violence and action are animated with the halting unreality of Fantastic Mr. Fox. In Jude Law's character's memory, the lighting shifts dramatically every time Something Important is about to happen; Wilkinson's older variation of the same character addresses the camera head-on, mimicking cinematically the feel of reading a book.
This is easier to see when contrasted with the last two non-Batman Christopher Nolan movies, The Prestige and Inception. Nolan clearly loves film as a medium, and both films are metaphors for movie-making. They both movies announce what they're doing as they're doing it, whether it's The Prestige's overt three act structure or Inception's refusal to provide closure regarding what's "really real."
But in my opinion, both those movies (excellent movies, by any other standard) fail to be more than just About Themselves. The fact that both movies are both about movies doesn't open up the experience of watching them, but it closes it down, collapses all interpretations into a single correct one.
Against those backdrops, then, Grand Budapest is a breath of fresh air. Anderson has made a formally interesting movie that's also deeply human.
There are narrative levels, sure, and you could interpret Grand Budapest as being about movie-making. The costumes are over the top. The color palettes are hypersaturated. But these things open the film up to interpretation rather than shutting it down. By questioning the direct "truth" of memory, Anderson invites us to think about how we remember things—whether through the bright saturated haze of Instagram filters or listening to someone tell a story.
Grand Budapest is marketed as an ensemble film, but there are only three real (which is to say, human-seeming) characters in the film. Over twenty actors' roles are more or less plot-motivators, broad caricatures of human beings. And that's for the best—the three "real" characters we meet are remarkably memorable. Both incarnations of Mr. Mustafa—his older self, portrayed with almost incomprehensible warmth and sensitivity by F. Murray Abraham, and Zero, his quiet and determined time spent as a bell-hop—are deeply relatable, from Mustafa's grief over lost love to Zero's insecure insistence that Mr. Gustave not flirt with his new girlfriend.
Martin Scali / Fox Searchlight PicturesTo say nothing of Ralph Finnes' performance as Mr. Gustave—considering my penchant for hyperbole, I'm gonna have to refrain from saying almost anything. Suffice it to say: most modern feel-good movies present you with characters you can either love and enjoy, or ones whose humanity is believable; Finnes has merged the two into one insanely cheery, insecure, generous, strict, loving, combative, honorable character.
You almost can't describe Mr. Gustave without also calling him the opposite—he is brave and cowardly, strong and weak, sweet and cold—and if that isn't the definition of a human character, I don't know what is.
I'm pretty sure one of the primary functions of art is "to express something about what it means to be human." I haven't always been sold on Wes Anderson's movies—I, being the suspicious curmudgeon I am, always had trouble figuring out if his movies were about more than how good of a filmmaker Anderson himself was.
But The Grand Budapest Hotel isn't just a fantastic argument for Anderson as artist—it's probably the best formally interesting movie that's also meaningful in years.
Caveat Spectator
All this said, The Grand Budapest Hotel may be highly whimsical, but it's not devoid of teeth. It's rated R for language, some sexual content, and violence. Somewhere in the ballpark of a dozen and a half f-words, and probably about half over again as many s-words and other third-string obscenities. Different people make jokes questioning Mr. Gustave's sexuality, and one uses a derogatory term for homosexuals.
Mr. Gustave frequently has affairs with the older residents of the Grand Budapest—we see a brief (perhaps half-second) shot of an older woman seeming to perform oral sex on him, but it's obscured and details are (gratefully) imperceptible. Some prison scenes contain nude pin-ups, but Anderson's style and cinematography render them about as harmful as a scene featuring Greco-Roman nude sculptures in an art gallery. When two characters steal a painting, they replace it with a graphic drawing of two women engaged in sexual activity—full "nudity" is on display, but it's so shocking and offensive (intentionally) that it's rendered almost totally non-sexual.
The film has several moments of shocking—if cartoonish—violence. A man's fingers are cut off by a sliding door; a woman is decapitated off-screen (her head is removed from a picnic basket and is briefly seen); a man is shoved off a cliff. A cat is thrown through an open window; we don't see its impact, but we see its residue from afar, and see a character carry around its remains in a bloodied burlap sack.
Jackson Cuidon is a writer in New York City. You can follow him on his semi-annually updated Twitter feed: @jxscott.
