Wes Anderson has such an easily identifiable bag of visual tricks, and his movies have such a distinct tone, that it’s always immediately obvious when you’re watching something that he’s made. His films don’t look like the typical movies that get played in suburban multiplexes, they don’t feel like the typical movies that get played in suburban multiplexes, and they don’t reach the audiences that see the typical movies that get played in suburban multiplexes. He makes movies for himself, that also happen to play to an enthusiastic but niche fanbase, and by you probably already know whether or not you’re a member of that fanbase, depending on how you’ve reacted to things like Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Moonrise Kingdom.
Because Anderson’s work is so singular and well-established, and because general audiences have already made their minds up in regards to how they feel about what he does, he’s become one of those directors whose movies probably aren’t best reviewed as standalone pieces of art. Instead, it tends to be most helpful to confirm that the new film does indeed fit inside of a box alongside the work that proceeded it, to warn the viewer that their feelings on said work are not likely to change, and then to do a little bit of discussion in regards to how the new film ranks amongst the filmography to date, and the small ways in which it might distinguish itself from the rest of the pack. So, now that The Grand Budapest Hotel has been released, let’s go ahead and approach this review by using just that strategy.
The Grand Budapest Hotel’s story is told through a series of narrative frameworks (which are all shot in a different aspect ratio) that keep digging back into the past until you get to the real subject of its focus. In the most modern of these timelines, a young girl is visiting the grave of an author who’s beloved for writing a book about a once-famous hotel called the Grand Budapest. In the middle story, a younger version of that author (Jude Law) is staying at the now-in-shambles, 1960s-era Grand Budapest, and is interviewing the enigmatic owner (F. Murray Abraham) about its glory days. Those glory days make for the third, and meatiest section of the story—the end of the hotel’s glory years, which take place in an on-the-brink-of-war Europe in the 1930s. We see this era through the eyes of the hotel’s new lobby boy, an orphaned refugee named Zero (Tony Revolori). He’s taken the hotel’s legendary concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) as his mentor, and he finds himself swept up in something of an adventure when one of the (many) elderly hotel guests who Gustave regularly sleeps with is murdered, and her will reveals that she has left Gustave the priceless painting ‘Boy With Apple,’ much to her surviving relatives’ dismay.
The movie that's been made here is very much a Wes Anderson movie, utilizing all of the tracking shots, intricate production design, stop-motion animation, dry absurdism, and fairy tale whimsy that you’ve come to expect from a story that’s been placed in his care. It should be noted just how wildly entertaining it is though. Visually, this has to be the most dense-with-design thing he’s done since The Royal Tenenbaums. Comedically, this has got to be the most aggressively funny thing he’s done since Rushmore. If you’re a fan of Anderson’s work at all, then it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’re going to have a good time with Grand Budapest Hotel.
Where it doesn’t quite hold up against his other work is when it comes to the emotional heart of the story. Despite the snarkiness that Anderson’s dry delivery often produces, or the lack of stakes that can sometimes come from the fairy tale nature of the worlds he creates, there’s always been a moment or two in each of his films to date where his characters’ humanity breaks through to tug on your heartstrings, and seeing as said humanity has had to do so much work to dig through the layers of artifice that serve as both the characters’ and their creator’s armor, they tend to hit even harder than they would have otherwise, thanks to the effort—this is basically Anderson’s secret weapon.
While it’s true that Anderson’s movies are often the type that take more than one viewing to fully unravel and appreciate, I’ve always walked out of my first viewings of them with at least an indication of where that extra-potent earnestness was shining through the most, and which of the film’s moments were bound to become my favorites after subsequent viewings. Think the scene where Bill Murray’s Herman Blume finally meets Max Fischer’s dad in Rushmore, when Ben Stiller’s Chas Tenenbaum admits to his estranged father that he’s had a rough year in Tenenbaums, or even when George Clooney’s Mr. Fox salutes the untamed wildness of the wolf in Fantastic Mr. Fox. With The Grand Budapest Hotel, however, I find myself walking away from my first viewing of the film not having any clue where the emotional heart of the film was supposed to have lied.
This is by far Anderson’s most plot-driven movie to date, which can make for a refreshing change of pace from his usual character-driven approach, but the negative effect of that seems to be that the film plays as more of a trivial romp than the heavier, heartier stuff he’s done in the past. Even The Life Aquatic had that moment where the Zissou character comes to terms with his legacy at the bottom of the ocean, and The Darjeeling Limited had the sequence where the three brothers were finally ripped out of their own self-centeredness when the young boys fell into the river. Where in this film was the moment where either Gustave or Zero experienced a true moment of vulnerable humanity? The two come to have a respect for each other, which is something of a breakthrough for the self-important Gustave, but theirs is more of the bond that forms between men who have shared a battlefield than the kind that forms between two people who have experienced a real personal connection.
It’s true that there could have been a real personal connection formed between Zero and the baker’s apprentice who he falls in love with (Saoirse Ronan), but Anderson’s script seems so intent on taking the focus off of that relationship that it goes as far as to have Zero explicitly refuse to address any of the joys or heartbreak their union brought him. Anderson’s characters are often defined through the coping mechanisms they use to obscure their vulnerabilities from the world, but in the past he’s always at least left the door open a crack so that the audience could peek through and see what they’re really feeling behind the scenes. Here it gets slammed shut right in our faces.
It’s hard to feel left out in the cold when Fiennes’ performance as the slick, self-obsessed Gustave is so damned effective at being a showy distraction though. Gustave has made his place in the world and established his reputation by playing people like a fiddle, by distracting them with their own wants and desires to the point where they don’t even notice that he’s ultimately serving himself in the background, and the usually dour Fiennes is so good at turning on the juice and playing the huckster here that I instantly lament the lengthy career in comedy he didn’t have. Gustave is a real trickster, an incorrigible scamp, the sort of character Bill Murray would have knocked out of the park in that earlier part of his career before he was playing melancholy, but Fiennes embodies him so effortlessly that it’s near impossible to imagine anyone else being as good in the role. Watching him work is worth the price of admission to this one alone.
The other big thing that makes Grand Budapest Hotel stand out from the rest of Anderson’s catalogue, besides the plot-driven story and the emotional distance, is the level of violence on display. Perhaps it makes sense given that the bulk of the story is taking place in a setting that’s on the brink of World War, but there’s quite a bit of violence happening here, and some of it is pretty brutal. Anderson’s work to this point has always had an almost childish take on violence and action. The few times he’s dabbled in action scenarios before, it’s always been presented as the bloodless kind of violence that exists in little boys’ imaginations. Here there’s some near gross-out level gore that shows up, and it comes as something of a surprise. Ultimately though, the blood and mutilation of Grand Budapest Hotel probably isn’t too far removed from the near-comic shootouts of The Life Aquatic. Whether you’re doing A-Team violence or slasher movie violence, you’re still refusing to imbue your violent acts with any of the gravity or consequence that a realistic portrayal would have lent it. Which, of course, can still be plenty entertaining, so long as action isn’t your primary focus. Anderson might have overstepped his bounds just a little bit by making one of the antagonists of his story a cutesy, Anderson-ized version of the Nazi SS though. Putting a cartoony gloss over movie violence is one thing, but doing the same to the most horrific things that have happened in modern history is bound to raise a few eyebrows.
The occasional misstep aside, probably the biggest thing to take away from The Grand Budapest Hotel is just how deftly Anderson is able to take so many competing tones, so many disparate visual elements, and bring them all together to create something that feels not only like a complete whole, but also something that is undeniably him. This movie has comedy, it has violence, it has literary high-mindedness. It features a protagonist who is at the same time lovable and despicable. It mixes elaborate sets, real locations, and purposely artificial-looking model work in order bring its titular hotel and the surrounding landscape to life—and somehow it all really does come together to feel like one coherent universe. If this was a movie from a debuting filmmaker, I’m not certain that audiences would have been able to accept it, but with Anderson at the helm, it’s another story. It’s almost like he’s been priming us with everything he’s made to date in order to get us to the point where we’d be able to find something this excessively and particularly flourished palatable. With each film he’s made he’s established another element of the fantasy world he wants to work in, and now that they've all come together in a movie as ambitious and unique as this—without any of it feeling alien or forced—one gets the impression that he’s finally free to let his imagination truly run wild.
Let’s just hope that, in the future, he remembers to save some time to focus on the emotional journeys of his protagonists as he’s composing symmetrical shots, designing sets, building models, cultivating eccentric soundtracks, commissioning portraits to be painted, and whatever other tasks inevitably need to be taken care of when you’re making a Wes Anderson movie. It’s those moments of heart that have always been my favorites.
