Editor's Note: Occasionally, our managing editor likes to write about film. Today, Chance reviews "The Grand Budapest Hotel," which is playing at Film Streams now through April 5. It opens this Friday at The Ross in Lincoln, where it will run through April 24.
A strange thing happens upon exit of The Grand Budapest Hotel. You descend from the alpine cable car that you, the audience, took up to the hotel’s wide, almost palatial doors. You walk out onto the streets of whatever city in which you saw Wes Anderson’s latest movie, and realize there has been no wind for the last 100 minutes.
Excluding one eagle’s nest view of a high-speed toboggan chase, true elements are a scarcity. This outside world, with its traffic cones, gravel and sagging cars with low air in just one tire, has no sense of Anderson’s obsessive symmetry.
On one hand, there is life and unpredictability in the world again. On the other, it’s grotesque.
To call what Anderson does in the halls of the mountainside hotel “universe building” implies a level of absent malleability. That phrase invokes the idea of crevices and pockets that could expand or contract in the dreamt European world. But there’s no chance of that. It is much more like being taken on a guided escalator tour of a dollhouse: a world of miniature sets and figurines that when you zoom in close enough become Ralph Fiennes, Adrien Brody and gorgeous costume and set design. It feels entirely preconceived before the arrival of the audience by an anal retentive scientist with an all-consuming love of tasteful Valentine’s Day cards.
The story, set in the fictional Central European republic of Zubrowka (filmed in Germany) is told in a sort of odd, inverse pyramid. Beginning in the present day with a young woman staring at the memorial bust of an author known as The Author, we dive into the work of the author, played for a brief moment by Tom Wilkinson, before immediately extending further back into his younger years, where he’s played by Jude Law. At this juncture, The Author is staying at a twilight years version of the Grand Budapest Hotel, which has aged ungracefully. The hotel is on its off season, colored in loud, infrared ‘60s shag and is virtually empty. The Author sets about to interviewing the mysterious owner of the hotel, Zero Moustafa, played by F. Murray Abraham. Faced with an interested writer’s question of how he came to own the Grand Budapest, Moustafa guides us back further toward the pyramid’s widest level, in the 1930s when he was a lobby boy and M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), the then-concierge, became his dearest friend and mentor.
If the sensibilities of Gustave, the concierge, are refined and complex, the rhythms of Ralph Fiennes’ character are simple. He’s a pontificating, romantic savant, who at the breaking point of his monologues will often knowingly interrupt its verbosity with profanity. A battlefield of manners that at least a half dozen times is dispensed in favor of “Oh fuck it!” And then we get on with whatever task Gustave and Moustafa were about to undertake in this tale of murder and false accusation.
Barring when he tried to kill Harry Potter, Fiennes may never have been freer as an actor, so natural in his extroversion. As Gustave, he sets about professionally pampering and personally romancing the hotel guests, mostly older blonde women. It’s never clear whether the level of service yields the sex, or whether the sex is merely one facet of a wealthy patron’s pleasant stay. But Gustave’s dual senses of flirtatiousness and propriety are ubiquitous, charming and not the least bit contradictory.
As the impressionable, well-mannered and eager lobby boy, Moustafa (played as a young man by Tony Revolori) is a willing pupil, a lonely immigrant in a land that Anderson defines aesthetically with Prussian visual grandeur. But with Fiennes’ unquestionably British diction and flare driving forward a movie that stews with all the vagueness of an American director comically making a movie to synthesize all of continental Europe.
In The Grand Budapest Hotel, as with about any Wes Anderson movie, you’re already in the atmosphere of filmmaking, aware of almost everything that’s come before.
In a recent panel interview, moderated by New York Film Festival’s Kent Jones, Anderson confessed to one of the film’s visual thefts from Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain: “Some things are inspired and some things are plagiarism. I feel we made it our own, but that’s what plagiarists do.”
He’s playing movie tricks, like having Adrien Brody bark out threats like a member of the American mafia, in a setting that’s entirely displaced. Anderson riffs on your movie lexicon in that way, too, convincing you that’s how tough, streetwise guys talk even if you’re an ocean away from New York City. He’s both poking fun at filmmakers and writers who’d try to get away with that kind of pop culture association, and then absolutely getting away with it himself.
And if there’s something slightly authoritarian about the way Anderson's moving camera drags your eyes around the screen in rigidly directed motions, it’s either exhausting or you give Anderson credit for visually drawing attention to the trick all filmmakers play with their cameras.
As in, “Every movie does this to you. I’m just letting you know while I do it.”
In one way, the hyper-obvious zooms and tunnel vision pans onto Anderson’s supporting cast hanker for audience cheers (well, let’s say chortles and golf claps, actually) when they fall on staple actors like Owen Wilson, Bill Murray and Ed Norton, constantly reminding you who the acrobats are in this circus troupe. And yet, it’s such surgical work that when it comes to delivering the actual lines and popping out of the ground like acting prairie mice, it doesn’t so much matter if the hotel concierges in later years are Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman or complete nobodies. They are important only to the visual language of the movie, talking paintings on the walls of the Grand Budapest, markers that simply let us know whose movie this is.
Why we’re funnelled four levels deep to the “real” story isn’t apparent. This bit of narrative excess is possibly the least organized opulence of the movie. Everything else in this world is doorways, windows, portrait frames, train tracks and cell blocks. If it’s not a parallelogram or a perfectly dissected shape, there’s not much place for it.
Ultimately, The Grand Budapest Hotel presents two in-script hypotheses for how the hotel and the story of its de facto father and son can be taken. That is, if the audience is interested in the mind that created this place and these people. If you’d rather check out of the hotel, comfortable with the fact that you’ve scene Ed Norton with a waxed mustache and Harvey Keitel essentially play Harvey Keitel during a Keystone Cops-esque prison break, the niceties may well have been enough to place The Grand Budapest Hotel somewhere akin to Fantastic Mr. Fox in Anderson’s body of work.
Only one of these hypotheses, though, really works.
At the opening, the older version of The Author (Wilkinson) claims one of the biggest misconceptions about writers is that they're constant dreamers. In fact, trying to explain his 1960s rendezvous with Moustafa, their characters and ideas are the products of encounters. Now, there’s a reading of Grand Budapest in which the timeless adopted-father-adopted-son relationship between Gustave and Moustafa is the payoff for every idiosyncrasy in Anderson’s arsenal. The stakes of this movie, with the script reveling in the occasional isolated bout of violence make the seriousness of Anderson's characters feel warranted. If Moonrise Kingdom was an all-out child’s farce, Gustave talking breathlessly about his daring plans is called for because he is, in fact, hunted at times. Zubrowka is at war. There is peril. The unflinching order of the hotel, when people run through hallways and balconies does feel like chaos, as though Anderson is touching on a post-WWI anxiety about the point at which a grid becomes a maze.
But there can be no question that a hand isn’t moving pieces around a four-tiered chess board. If The Author aims to argue how truly literal and circumstantial Anderson’s world is, his book will need far more liner notes.
For as paternal as the relationship between Fiennes and Revolori is, the emotional core of the film is the invisible third chair at the table with the older Moustafa and Jude Law. Abraham’s baritone storytelling grace is where the heart of the sometimes haywire comedy resides. To oversimplify for a moment — in a narrative Chinese finger trap, to watch the movie is to be The Author. To watch Moustafa tell it, is to watch Anderson tell it.
And here is the mantra that actually works. Moustafa asserts that Gustave was wilfully in charge of upkeep for a self-fictionalized world of civility. His maintenance of that illusion was his art. This holds for Wes Anderson. As a director, he’s a designer in the vein of Willy Wonka, concoctions sweet enough and artisan enough to make us forget every piece of beauty we saw here was made in a test tube. Because at least for now, a superficial attachment to the formulaic is what makes him ripe for parody. Saturday Night Live can produce this, everyone can say, “Hey, that’s pretty spot on!” Because the question of how full or empty the style of his movies proves to be has, since 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums, always trailed somewhere behind the style.
High up in the mountains, in a pristine land of full service room service, Wes Anderson tells us nothing new about what he wants to do, just that he can do it more intricately than ever before.
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s managing editor. Reach him at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.