The Grand Budapest Hotel: Review

10th March 2014

By Will M.

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL: Wes Anderson

For those who want a simple, facile, blow-it-all-up-in-1080p approach to storytelling, let me tell you straight off that The Grand Budapest Hotel is probably not for you. Equally, it’s not a Nordic woolly-jumper-stare-out-of-windows-detective-drama either. If, however, you want something which has a pleasing layered quality, something that keeps your attention, knocks it around a little bit and hands it back ever so slightly different than before, book a ticket. Go ahead, do it now. I’ll wait.

Done? Good. Writing a synopsis for a film like this will go one of two ways, and when it eventually goes to network television, I’m sure the short way will win. The first, over-simplified way is to say that it is a quasi-surreal comedy about a hotel in a fictional inter-war country and its staff and guests. That doesn’t really do it justice, if I’m honest. The second option is that it is the recollection of an author who stayed in a hotel in 1968 and met the owner completely by accident, who regales him with stories of when he was the lobby boy, to whom amazing stories were occasionally told by the then-Concierge, and even then, we have the stroke and line of it, but not the fill.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is a wonderful film and I mean that in the sense that is full of wonder. It takes the sort-of-timeless-but-not-really feel of a Tintin comic, fuses it with the absurdity of a Coen Brothers film (such as the well-recommended Burn After Reading), inserts the playful, occasionally non-sequitur nature of a Monty Python and sets it all against the background of what could make a beautiful indie video game. Adam Stockhausen, the production designer, has pulled off a coup.

Everything about The Grand Budapest Hotel feels well planned, with Wes Anderson (who brought us the stop-motion Fantastic Mr Fox) making sure that everything you need to see is seen and that what you see needs to be there. I expect that the DVD and Blu-Ray (although, let’s be honest, that rather assumes DVD will still be around) of The Grand Budapest Hotel will bring frame-grabbers (myself included) plenty of fun pausing and picking out the Easter eggs such as documents which are shown in close-up and the occasional drop-in shot for only a few frames. The cinematography of Robert D. Yeoman was a major factor in making this film what it was. Even if the soundtrack of The Grand Budapest Hotel had gone walkies during our viewing, I don’t think it would have made it any less appealing as a visual work. Each shot during the entire film is parallel to something. It’s all dead-on or right-angled. This really only struck me at about 15 minutes in and it lent a certain order and tidiness to everything. Any panning shots go 90 degrees or a full 180. This straightness of camera contrasted nicely against the disorder it showed.

Characterisation is another area in which The Grand Budapest Hotel delivers. Ralph Fiennes is commanding but pitiable as Monsieur Gustave H., a mixed bag of a character with various sides and layers, truly three-dimensional and, despite not being the narrator of the film, the main character for the most part. He has an obsession with romantic poetry, but can deliver a blinding curse when the time is right.

Tony Revolori, a relative newcomer, stands exceptionally well on his own two feet in this film and portrays Zero Moustafa, the new lobby boy. Zero’s character has a past that would probably make a good feature by itself but he grows with you as you watch. When we are introduced to Zero, he has a pencil moustache and seems a little unsure of himself, but he matures, falls in love and we, at least, are brought along for the ride and it is safe to say that the character we see at the end is not the same.

This is not to say that the secondary characters are under-represented. The Grand Budapest Hotel has a fantastic cast, from Jeff Goldblum as Deputy Kovacs to a heavily made-up Tilda Swinton as the 84-year-old Madame D.

As a 15 rating, The Grand Budapest Hotel gets away with stuff you’d never manage in a 12A, and that’s OK. There’s nothing gratuitous; it all adds to the story or just shows how silly the whole thing really is. It is silly. But that’s what makes it so farcically charming.

I could use ten-dollar words to describe The Grand Budapest Hotel, but I won’t. It stands as a visual treat in its own right, but has the cast, the script and the feel to bring out a totally rampant comedy and it is important, I think, that you see it.

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