The Grand Budapest Hotel. (18.)
Directed by Wes Anderson.
Starring Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, Saoirse Ronan, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe, Adrien Brody and Jeff Goldblum. Out on Blu-ray and DVD from Criterion Collection. 99 mins.
The Grand Budapest Hotel is Wes Anderson's most successful, most popular, most loved film. It's the one everybody likes, even those who find his other films a little too precious and whimsywankical. Released in 2014 it became a massive hit, making $170 million worldwide. It was like a 90s shoegazing band suddenly recording a global earworm; the Cocteau Twins finding their equivalent of Smells Like Teen Spirit. Its pleasures though are tinged with sadness, a hard-to-shake intuition that the best film Anderson has made so far will also turn out to be the best he ever makes. We really hit it off, but it was a one time deal.
There are two main reasons why people love the film. Firstly it is funny. Not amusing but actually, genuinely, laughing on the outside funny. And it looks incredible. All WAnderson film are exquisitely poised and meticulously put together but the visual beauty of GBH is a step beyond that. His live-action films are broadly realistic but GBH is all tricks and toys. It's packed with models, minatures, front projection, matte paintings and false perspectives; a visual compendium of cinematic artifice from the silent era to the present day. I don't think there's ever been a film that is such an overt celebration of craftsmanship. Everything looks like some wretched little man or woman had whittled away in some sunken studio for hours and hours to get it to look just so.
At the start of proceedings, the viewer is delivered to the Grand Budapest Hotel, by way of a relay race back through history. (It's more of a relay stroll in truth, though a great distance is covered in a short time.) Starting in the present the baton is passed back down the ages: a cemetery bust hands over to the author buried beneath it; the famous author hand over to his younger self who gets chatting to someone in the hotel lobby who hands over to a younger version of himself, until we reach the film’s setting – the fictional central European republic of Zubrowska, between the wars.
You can never have too many framing devices in my opinion, especially as here the film makes a visual pun of it, giving each one its own aspect ratio which alters the size and shape of the frame, reducing the image down from widescreen to the boxy 4:3 that most of the film is in. Each framing device acts as a filter, sifting away another layer of grit and realism until the viewer has been thoroughly cleansed of the 21st century. Only then are we ready to enter Mr Anderson’s fantastical Grand Budapest Hotel, a Hotel that was very grand indeed though not located in Budapest. The GBH exists in a fantasy of old Central Europe, an opulent slice of Vienna stuck halfway up a mountain near a ski resort, accessible by funicular from a nearby town that bears a close relation to Prague. It's a pristine dollhouse set in a bleak and menacing world.
At the centre is Ralph Fiennes, in mesmerising form as M. Gustave, the concierge who ran the hotel in its 30s heyday. He busies himself ensuring everything is pristine and indulging himself sexually with most of the hotel's elderly wealthy female guests. These include a 90-year-old Tilda Swinton who dies shortly after their latest assignation, plunging him and his faithful lobby boy Zero Moustafa (Revolori) into a desperate struggle to avoid the deadly clutches of her psychotic family after he is bequeathed a valuable painting in the will.
This Hotel caters only for the very best. Its clientele includes Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, F.Murray Abraham, Jude Law, Tom Wilkinson, Mathieu Amalric, Lea Seydoux, Harvey Keitel, Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson, all showing up for roles that are often so brief they barely count as cameos. It’s like an art-house equivalent of the star-studded David Niven film version of Around the World in Eighties Days. Fiennes and Revolori are its Phileas Fogg and Passepartout, linking us to all the star turns. None of them upstages the central double act though. Fiennes has never been better; Revolori has barely been seen since, which seems monstrously unfair. He's great in this. Overshadowed, true, but as the Syd Little in their relationship, he offers sterling support. It's a role that ought to have been parleyed into something more than a recurring friend role in the latest incarnation of Spider-man.
It's good to see the whiney trust fund melancholy of Anderson's earlier films replaced with characters who are prepared to fight for their riches. Gustave is a man of elegance and refinement, but also a scrapper and a hustler. The film's recurring (perhaps unvarying) joke is the jolt of register with which seeming cultured people slip into coarse profanity. Indeed most of the film is based on the dissonance between the French fancy delicacy of the visuals and the darkness of events. And the events are very dark indeed.
(The film is dedicated to the writing of Stefan Zweig but I wonder if The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas, another multi-layered narrative set in a central European hotel that heads toward a terrible atrocity, is a hidden inspiration.)
The film's approach to the darkness is not to face up to it. There is war, murder, dismemberment and casual brutality but having chosen to include them, the plot skims over them. They can't be ignored, but they aren't dwelt on. The film is about our idealised image of the past, our condescending sentimentality about those that came before us. The film packs up their suffering into a beautifully wrapped package of melancholy that, at the end of the film, is handed back up through the years to the present day. GBH is a sumptuous, joyous entertainment, yet the sadness sticks with you much more than in Anderson's previous films.
Supplements
Directed by Wes Anderson.
Starring Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, Saoirse Ronan, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe, Adrien Brody and Jeff Goldblum. Out on Blu-ray and DVD from Criterion Collection. 99 mins.
The Grand Budapest Hotel is Wes Anderson's most successful, most popular, most loved film. It's the one everybody likes, even those who find his other films a little too precious and whimsywankical. Released in 2014 it became a massive hit, making $170 million worldwide. It was like a 90s shoegazing band suddenly recording a global earworm; the Cocteau Twins finding their equivalent of Smells Like Teen Spirit. Its pleasures though are tinged with sadness, a hard-to-shake intuition that the best film Anderson has made so far will also turn out to be the best he ever makes. We really hit it off, but it was a one time deal.
There are two main reasons why people love the film. Firstly it is funny. Not amusing but actually, genuinely, laughing on the outside funny. And it looks incredible. All WAnderson film are exquisitely poised and meticulously put together but the visual beauty of GBH is a step beyond that. His live-action films are broadly realistic but GBH is all tricks and toys. It's packed with models, minatures, front projection, matte paintings and false perspectives; a visual compendium of cinematic artifice from the silent era to the present day. I don't think there's ever been a film that is such an overt celebration of craftsmanship. Everything looks like some wretched little man or woman had whittled away in some sunken studio for hours and hours to get it to look just so.
At the start of proceedings, the viewer is delivered to the Grand Budapest Hotel, by way of a relay race back through history. (It's more of a relay stroll in truth, though a great distance is covered in a short time.) Starting in the present the baton is passed back down the ages: a cemetery bust hands over to the author buried beneath it; the famous author hand over to his younger self who gets chatting to someone in the hotel lobby who hands over to a younger version of himself, until we reach the film’s setting – the fictional central European republic of Zubrowska, between the wars.
You can never have too many framing devices in my opinion, especially as here the film makes a visual pun of it, giving each one its own aspect ratio which alters the size and shape of the frame, reducing the image down from widescreen to the boxy 4:3 that most of the film is in. Each framing device acts as a filter, sifting away another layer of grit and realism until the viewer has been thoroughly cleansed of the 21st century. Only then are we ready to enter Mr Anderson’s fantastical Grand Budapest Hotel, a Hotel that was very grand indeed though not located in Budapest. The GBH exists in a fantasy of old Central Europe, an opulent slice of Vienna stuck halfway up a mountain near a ski resort, accessible by funicular from a nearby town that bears a close relation to Prague. It's a pristine dollhouse set in a bleak and menacing world.
At the centre is Ralph Fiennes, in mesmerising form as M. Gustave, the concierge who ran the hotel in its 30s heyday. He busies himself ensuring everything is pristine and indulging himself sexually with most of the hotel's elderly wealthy female guests. These include a 90-year-old Tilda Swinton who dies shortly after their latest assignation, plunging him and his faithful lobby boy Zero Moustafa (Revolori) into a desperate struggle to avoid the deadly clutches of her psychotic family after he is bequeathed a valuable painting in the will.
This Hotel caters only for the very best. Its clientele includes Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, F.Murray Abraham, Jude Law, Tom Wilkinson, Mathieu Amalric, Lea Seydoux, Harvey Keitel, Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson, all showing up for roles that are often so brief they barely count as cameos. It’s like an art-house equivalent of the star-studded David Niven film version of Around the World in Eighties Days. Fiennes and Revolori are its Phileas Fogg and Passepartout, linking us to all the star turns. None of them upstages the central double act though. Fiennes has never been better; Revolori has barely been seen since, which seems monstrously unfair. He's great in this. Overshadowed, true, but as the Syd Little in their relationship, he offers sterling support. It's a role that ought to have been parleyed into something more than a recurring friend role in the latest incarnation of Spider-man.
It's good to see the whiney trust fund melancholy of Anderson's earlier films replaced with characters who are prepared to fight for their riches. Gustave is a man of elegance and refinement, but also a scrapper and a hustler. The film's recurring (perhaps unvarying) joke is the jolt of register with which seeming cultured people slip into coarse profanity. Indeed most of the film is based on the dissonance between the French fancy delicacy of the visuals and the darkness of events. And the events are very dark indeed.
(The film is dedicated to the writing of Stefan Zweig but I wonder if The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas, another multi-layered narrative set in a central European hotel that heads toward a terrible atrocity, is a hidden inspiration.)
The film's approach to the darkness is not to face up to it. There is war, murder, dismemberment and casual brutality but having chosen to include them, the plot skims over them. They can't be ignored, but they aren't dwelt on. The film is about our idealised image of the past, our condescending sentimentality about those that came before us. The film packs up their suffering into a beautifully wrapped package of melancholy that, at the end of the film, is handed back up through the years to the present day. GBH is a sumptuous, joyous entertainment, yet the sadness sticks with you much more than in Anderson's previous films.
Supplements
- New audio commentary featuring Anderson, filmmaker Roman Coppola, critic Kent Jones, and actor Jeff Goldblum
- Selected-scene storyboard animatics
- “The Making of ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel,’” a new documentary about the film
- New interviews with the cast and crew
- Video essays from 2015 and 2020 by critic Matt Zoller Seitz and film scholar David Bordwell
- Behind-the-scenes, special-effects, and test footage
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: A 2014 essay by critic Richard Brody and a collectable poster, along with (on the Blu-ray) excerpts from an additional 2014 piece by Brody, an 1880 essay on European hotel portiers by Mark Twain, and other ephemera
