My basic inclination is, like many, to like every new film from Wes Anderson. He had me had Bottle Rocket, and even the ones I haven’t enjoyed as much (Life Aquatic, The Darjeeling Limited) haven’t pushed me away.
The Grade Budapest Hotel is a delight. It’s delightful. Watching it brings the viewer a feeling of delight. It’s an “expensive pastry from a Manhattan sweet-ery” kind of delight. A “watching children in formal wear dance” sort of delight.
Anderson’s meticulously crafted film holds its viewers tight and walks them through a labyrinth of manners, men and mystery.
The story is essentially a character study of one M. Gustav: a hotel concierge, bon vivant and proprietor of propriety. He’s well-mannered, a charming lover and a keeper of elegance and tradition in a world that’s slowly losing both.
After one of his elderly paramours dies, Gustav is both blessed by the will and subsequently accused of murder. The subsequent unfolding takes our main character and his sidekick on a journey throughout Europe in search of clues and closure.
While so much of the film exhibits a purposeful intentionality by its director, he injects little moments of disjointedness to keep the action loose. The studied and elegant speech, not only from Gustav but all of the other characters as well, is punctuated with bursts of course language, profanity that seems out of place in a world of grand hotels and dowager countesses. So too does the range of accents present. A mix of actors from around the western world are used, and even though the film ostensibly takes place in Eastern Europe, they all keep their own way of speaking. It lends a comfort to the delivery but pulls back the curtain just a bit on the suspension of disbelief.
(Is having Adrian Brody, the Jewish protagonist of The Pianist, play a psuedo-Nazi an historical-critical comment by Anderson? I don’t yet have a Ph.D. in cultural studies, so this one will have to be left up in the air.)
The Grand Budapest Hotel ends with a poignant comment. Asked about Gustav’s place in the world, his former sidekick and now-aged narrator says, “His world had vanished long before he ever entered it, but he certainly sustained the illusion with a remarkable grace.”
In this time of the auteur, it’s impossible not to assign this designation to Anderson himself. Did he, sitting in his fancy private school in Houston, have dreams of days long past? Would he get along better in a world of Billy Wilders and Frank Capras? Regardless, his films are exceedingly modern while still nodding at a more romantic time.
There can never be too many beautiful films, so I look forward to more Wes Anderson over the years. His ability imbue them with sympathetic characters and catchy plots make it all the better.