Thursday, 6 March 2014
It’s a tough choice, but if I had to pick the most Wes Anderson
moment in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” it would be the part when inmates escape
from a prison using tiny sledgehammers and pickaxes that have been smuggled
past the guards inside fancy frosted pastries. This may, come to think of it,
be the most Wes Anderson thing ever, the very quintessence of his impish,
ingenious and oddly practical imagination. So much care has been lavished on
the conceit and its execution that you can only smile in admiration, even if
you are also rolling your eyes a little.
“The Grand Budapest Hotel,” Mr. Anderson’s eighth feature, will
delight his fans, but even those inclined to grumble that it’s just more of the
same patented whimsy might want to look again. As a sometime grumbler and
longtime fan, I found myself not only charmed and touched but also moved to a
new level of respect.
“The Grand Budapest Hotel,” Mr. Anderson’s
eighth feature, will delight his fans, but even those inclined to grumble that
it’s just more of the same patented whimsy might want to look again. As a
sometime grumbler and longtime fan,
I found myself not only charmed and touched but also moved to a new level of
respect.
There is no doubt that Mr. Anderson possesses a
distinctive sensibility and a consistent visual style, and that instead of
striking out in new directions, he tends to embroider and elaborate on familiar
themes and pictorial habits. You will see many of them here: static, densely
packed, fussily composed frames; traveling shots in which the camera glides
alongside the characters like a low-flying bird; action sequences that refuse
the usual digital hocus-pocus in favor of the older, artisanal magic of
stop-motion animation, matte paintings and rear projection. You will also meet
eccentric characters possessed by a kind of madcap melancholy, soulful and
silly in equal measure. Some of them are played by actors you have seen
elsewhere in the Anderson oeuvre, including Bob Balaban, Tilda Swinton and of
course (albeit briefly) Owen Wilson and Bill Murray.
So yes, a Wes Anderson movie, and hooray for that. At the
moment, there are very few American filmmakers with the ability to articulate
such an original, idiosyncratic vision and the means to express that vision so
freely. There is a lot of integrity here and also a good deal of ambition. This
is a movie concerned with — and influenced by — an especially rich and
complicated slice of 20th-century European culture, and therefore a reckoning,
characteristically playful but also fundamentally serious, with some very ugly
history.
Throughout,
we are in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka, a mountainous land that
cartographers of various eras might have plotted on the distant marches of
successive empires — Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Soviet — or else erased
altogether. The main story is rendered in narrow, boxy dimensions that evoke
the films of its era, which is the 1930s. But there are two frames around this
narrative, which is in effect a flashback within a flashback. We start out in
1985, under a late-Communist gray sky in a town of cemeteries and statues. An
aging writer (Tom Wilkinson) shoos away his grandson and recalls the time in
1968 when his younger self (Jude Law) stayed at the nearly empty, Iron
Curtain-tacky Grand Budapest Hotel and became acquainted with its elegant and
enigmatic proprietor, Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham).
For
his part, Moustafa reminisces about his first days at the hotel, where he was a
mere lobby boy known as Zero (Tony Revolori) and the place was dominated by its
charismatic concierge, M. Gustave. Portrayed by Ralph Fiennes with
high-stepping liveliness and an evocative mustache, Gustave is both courtier
and sovereign, a devoted servant to the guests and the capricious, mostly
benevolent ruler of the staff. He corrects their slightest lapses of deportment
and lectures them endlessly at mealtimes. He is a lover of poetry and also of
the elderly women who summon him to their suites, and maybe of a few men as
well. Somehow, he is both an ascetic and a sensualist, highly disciplined and
completely irresponsible. A thoroughly ridiculous man and at the same time “a
glimmer of civilization in the barbaric slaughterhouse we know as humanity.”
That
phrase occurs twice in the film and is the key to its intentions. In the real
1930s, places like Zubrowka were on the brink of inconceivable barbarism and
unprecedented slaughter. A beautiful, fragile Central European civilization was
all but demolished, surviving mainly as the ghostly object of nostalgic
longing. Mr. Anderson embraces this nostalgia — for a bygone modernity of
railway compartments, telegrams and handmade luggage; of louche aristocrats,
discreet bellhops and ruddy-faced workingmen; of painting and poetry and
psychoanalysis — but he also tries to work through it, to capture some of the
vitality and peculiarity of a vanished world.
Photo
Ralph Fiennes and Tony Revolori in
"The Grand Budapest Hotel." CreditFox
Searchlight Pictures
One of
his guides in this enterprise is Stefan Zweig (1881-1942),
the prolific and celebrated Viennese writer whose physical appearance and
mercurial energy Mr. Fiennes pointedly evokes. While not specifically based on
Zweig’s work, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” conjures some of its defining traits:
quickness, compression and a highly refined sense of the nuances that separate
comedy from tragedy.
On the
surface, there is a lot more comedy. The main plot spins around an elaborate,
Tintin-esque caper involving a stolen painting and a clan of vengeful Zubrowkan
nobles. (Ms. Swinton plays the matriarch, Adrien Brody her viperous son and
Willem Dafoe the fearsome family hit man.) Zero, a refugee from another made-up
geopolitical trouble spot, falls in love with Agatha (Saoirse Ronan), a baker’s
assistant with a Mexico-shaped birthmark on her cheek. I will refrain from
saying too much more about what happens, or about who shows up in what
capacity.
It’s
all a lot of fun, but it isn’t only fun. Or rather, it’s fun in the service of
a subtle and sober argument. If Zweig is one of the film’s mid-20th-century,
middle-European Jewish patron saints, another is Ernst Lubitsch, the filmmaker
who left Berlin for Hollywood in 1922 and whose name connotes a peerlessly
suave and humane comic touch. He functions in “The Grand Budapest Hotel” less
as an influence — Mr. Anderson is a much sloppier storyteller — than as a point
of reference. On two memorable occasions, Lubitsch, without losing his sense of
humor, confronted contemporary totalitarianism: in “Ninotchka” (1939),
with Greta Garbo as a Soviet agent in Paris, and in “To Be or Not to Be”
(1942), with Jack Benny as a Polish actor performing for the Nazis.
These
films fight tyranny with irony, frivolity and unshakable charm. It goes without
saying that those are inadequate and perhaps inappropriate weapons against
tanks and secret policemen. But even now, with full, bloody hindsight, we can
appreciate the lesson that lightheartedness and laughter can oppose the heavy
hand of political oppression.
That
hand casts an oblique shadow over “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Hitler and Stalin
don’t exist in this kingdom of make-believe, but sudden eruptions of violence
and the offhand mention of tragic happenings point toward a profound darkness
just outside the frame. Mr. Anderson is no realist. This movie makes a
marvelous mockery of history, turning its horrors into a series of graceful
jokes and mischievous gestures. You can call this escapism if you like. You can
also think of it as revenge.
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” is rated R (Under 17 requires
accompanying parent or adult guardian). Naughty words and deeds, and some bloodshed,
too.
News Source: www.nytimes.com
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