Wes Anderson prefers not to enter himself into a particular time and place unless he’s able to twist and turn his subject until it’s ready to fit into HIS world. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, his eighth and best feature, his enchanting stylization rises to a level of obsessiveness that bodes well for the adventurous filmgoer. Anderson pulls all the stops in production values in taking on the vanished elegance of Old World Europe between the World Wars. His stock company, now enlarged by an even wider swath of familiar actors (no fewer than 17 this time) is here bolstered by a zany, bravura performance by Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes plays Gustave H., a genteel and dapper yet manic and profane hotel concierge who has a way with words and with ladies of a certain advanced age. He controls the Grand Budapest Hotel with a courtly whip.
Anderson may create his archly meticulous world with a glittering attention to detail but it is Fiennes who brings it to life with marvelous assurance. Any lesser hand in the lead role could easily have tipped the delicate balance between wacky whimsy and weary affectation that is present in all of Anderson’s work. When he’s on his game (Moonrise Kingdom, Rushmore) Anderson demonstrates that a deliberate, elaborately heightened style, rather than risk overcoming substance, can actually become the very substance of a film. His less than successful ventures (The Darjeeling Limited, The Life Aquatic…) erred on the side of precocious quirkiness. Neither had a savior like Fiennes to rein itself in.
Real places and real events are absent from The Grand Budapest Hotel. It takes place in a fictitious Central European country, Zubrowka (incidentally the name of a real-life Polish vodka). It deals with jackbooted secret police but never actually names their brand of fascism. In fact Gustave seems bothered more than anything by their rude intrusion on his orderly world of civility. Madame D. (Tilda Swinton, convincingly made up to be in her 80s) could be any rich, glitzy socialite of the day. Her greedy, heavy-handed son, Dmitri (Adrien Brody), means to make life difficult for Gustave, who after Madame D.’s untimely death, has surprisingly been named the heir to her valuable painting. A strange Jeff Goldblum presides as the executor of her will. Soon Dmitri and family henchman Jopling (Willem Dafoe) are pursuing Gustave and a lad named Zero (Tony Revolori), who is Gustave’s constant companion and lobby boy apprentice. An adult Zero (F. Murray Abraham) is actually telling the whole story-within-a-story from the framework of a flashback from the Communist-era setting in the 1980s, where he now owns the seen-better-days hotel.
Anderson uses 1930s film references and creative old-school stunts, miniatures, and nifty camera work to create an Old Hollywood suspense vibe. To great effect, he brazenly uses different film ratios and film stocks for each of his three time periods. His use of bold colors render his hand-painted backdrops particularly vivid. His sets encompass prison camps, railway cars, ski lifts, and of course, hotel lobbies. Elegant glamour with a light touch pervades.
Yet underneath the caper-movie front is an undercurrent of seriousness. Inspired by the writings of exiled Austrian Jew Stefan Zweig, who committed suicide in 1942, the rapid-fire The Grand Budapest Hotel leaves a lingering chill. Anderson may be presenting the impending horrors about to soon take over Europe in a manner entirely on his own terms, but the film’s final effect is as profound as it is madcap. You don’t miss the grace until it is gone.