A Grand Budapest Delight

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What do you get when you combine a famed hotel concierge, a skilled pastry chef, a deceased wealthy Madame, and a budding lobby boy? A fantastic, immeasurably charming mötley crüe of characters involved in various escapades, including stealing works of art, orchestrating a jailbreak, and making lucky escapes. Welcome to the Grand Budapest Hotel.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is a delectable dessert of a film. It’s amusing yet thoughtful, and gleeful yet melancholy. It’s Wes Anderson up to his usual quirky tricks again, but with a new cast and an upgraded vision. The screenplay is chock-full of his usual wit, and its humor ranges from refined and subtle to outright hilarious.

Photo courtesy of Xtreme Radio.

As clarification for those of you who have not seen an Anderson movie before, it usually goes something like this. You take Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, one or both Wilson brothers, and Adrien Brody, coupled with a smattering of other instantly recognizable, talented actors and actresses to make a sensational cast. Next, these actors embody a whimsical, nostalgically written screenplay that usually involves some sort of daring adventure, performed by the most unexpected of characters. Finally, you top it all off with a delightful soundtrack, a meticulous attention to detail and subtlety, and colorful, vibrant set decoration. Once you have all these elements, you add a narrator and a title like “Royal Tenenbaums” or “Moonrise Kingdom,” and let the critical acclaim and award nominations roll on in.

Anderson’s new movie certainly fits the bill in terms of these classifications, but it goes even further than that. His Grand Budapest cast, which included Ralph Fiennes, Saoirse Ronan, and Tony Revolori, added fresh faces and styles to his set. The film was more plot-heavy, with much more happening within his typical time frame of 100 minutes than usual. It also ended on a more somber note than usual, which I found to be much more thought-provoking than his last movie, Moonrise Kingdom’s, happy ending.

Photo courtesy of highsnobiety.com.

The plot contained an extra dose of whimsy with a heavy sprinkling of sarcasm, even more so than traditional Anderson. The movie is set in the fictional Zubrowka and narrated by the Zero Moustafa, the Grand Budapest Hotel’s owner, years after the hotel reached its prime during the 1930s. Zero recounts his story of those days, when he was the lobby boy and Gustave H., portrayed stupendously by Fiennes, was its renowned concierge and his mentor.

Gustave H. is the movie’s most fascinating and laugh-inducing character. He speaks with a refined vocabulary, expects the very best from his employees, and spritzes himself with his aptly named cologne, “L’Air du Panache.” He is very friendly, and sexually intimate, with the elderly blonde women who often enjoy his hospitality at the hotel. One of these women is Madame D., whose death is the center of the plot and the reason for all of Zero’s and Gustave’s adventures.

The rest of the characters, including Saoirse Ronan as the pastry chef of Mendl’s and Adrien Brody as Madame D.’s conniving son, get involved in the thickening plot, but I won’t reveal how. The film gets more and more enchanting and fanciful every step of the way. Each scene is riddled with eccentric characters and moments, and the plot twists are often entirely unpredictable.

Photo courtesy of Hollywood Reporter.

However, this movie is not really about the storyline. Its forte lies in its humor. Anderson skillfully and continually etches out jokes from the most insipid ideas, transforming any situation into an uproarious one. The humor ranges from dry and polished, to brash and riotous, to quirky and idiosyncratic. The humor can be situational, ironic, nonsensical, satirical, or witty. Simply the way in which Anderson presents circumstances can be comical. He often exaggerates them in the same way that we viewers imagine our own lives while daydreaming. The most mundane exchange of letters can become an exciting, fantastical event. It is this skill of Anderson’s that attracts so many viewers; he personifies our reveries and imaginations in a way that no other director does.

Anderson’s movies alternate between having melancholy endings and happy endings. The Royal Tenenbaums and Moonrise Kingdom both had relatively joyous conclusions, while The Darjeeling Limited and The Grand Budapest Hotel less so. This film probably won’t leave you in tears, don’t get me wrong, but there is something innately nostalgic and poignant about the way the movie closes. Anderson’s characters are so visceral and human that you can’t help but feel for them. His yearning for an older time is clear, and his portrayal of a second-rate hotel in its former golden years leaves the viewer longing for simpler times, when Gustave H. was the proprietor of the Grand Budapest Hotel.

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