Film Review: Typically stylish but deceptively thoughtful, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014) finds Wes Anderson once again using ornate visual environments to explore deeply emotional ideas. Course after course of desserts, presented with a flourish and served so promptly that you can barely catch your breath between treats. Its not until an hour or two has passed that you realize that you havent really eaten anything. In a very appealing if outre way, its sensibility and concerns are very much those of an earlier, more elegant era, meaning that the films deepest intentions will fly far over the heads of most modern filmgoers. The films shaggy-dog, sort-of-whodunit yarn offers laughs and energy that make this Andersons most fun film since “Rushmore” (1996). Ive had my Wes Anderson breakthrough - or maybe its that hes had his. The film is a marvelous contraption, a wheels-within-wheels thriller thats pure oxygenated movie play. Anderson works so assiduously to create obsessively detailed on-screen worlds that the effect has sometimes been hermetic, even stifling. The film, however, is anything but. Anderson has abandoned a bit of his whimsical nature for the later portions of the film, but the film’s first half hour presents one of his most darling settings yet, until, of course, it all crumbles into murder, mayhem and bad renovations. It is a culmination of the tinkly music-box aesthetic of Andersons work to date, turned up to 11. While Anderson delights in creating a fictional (but very real) mittel-Europe, he also does it with the craft of old Hollywood, using carefully made miniatures and handpainted backdrops. Anderson writes about the American aristocracy, his latest film about the European upper-crust...gets us perfectly. Anderson understands that the elegance of the Grand Budapest is just a facade, that beneath the glitter is the cancer of greed and fascism. 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 entire movie is like a giant, elaborately decorated cake, created by this most exacting of film craftsmen. And how tasty it is! With this film, Wes Anderson is up to his old tricks but with a magnanimous new confidence that feels like a gift. Its quintessential Anderson, in other words, but also an unabashed entertainment. And thats something to see. It is by far the most headlong comedic affair in Andersons canon. Its practically Marx Brothers-ian at moments. From the start, its clear Anderson is working with a new sophistication both in the vocabulary and structure of the films voiceover narrations. If a movie can be elegantly zany, this wholly imaginative, assured fable of a legendary concierge Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), his protégé Zero (Tony Revolori) and the murder of a countess, is it. The comedy in the film is among the broadest yet undertaken by Anderson. But amid the frenzied hubbub, there are intimations of a darker, sadder history unfolding. Anderson’s latest invention, the film, may be his most meticulously realized, beginning with the towering, fictional building for which it’s named. It offers an engaging 90+ minutes of unconventional, comedy-tinged adventure that references numerous classic movies while developing a style and narrative approach all its own. Every frame is carefully composed like the illustrations from a beloved book (characters are precisely centered; costumes are elaborately literal); the dialogue feels both unexpected and happily familiar. If Anderson buries relatively little moral substance under lavish dollops of rich cream, at least he, like his fascinating protagonist, sustains the illusion with a marvelous grace. The tender friendship between the wide-eyed Zero and the worldly Gustave gives this movie an emotional core that isnt always an Anderson priority. The opéra-bouffe plot serves as a strand of bright golden wire on which Anderson hangs innumerable encounters, scampering chases, and an archly decorative style of commentary. Im not sure what the formal definition of a masterpiece is, but the film strikes me as something very close. Overall, it receives 4.5/5 stars!
Posted on: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 11:23:36 +0000
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