The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Director: Wes Anderson                                Writer: Wes Anderson
Film Score: Alexandre Desplat                      Cinematography: Robert D. Yeoman
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham, Tony Revolori and Jude Law

While Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel was something of a critical darling, and was even nominated for a best picture Oscar, it is actually more of a disappointment than anything else. It seems as if what he’s attempting here is a cross between the Coen Brothers and Tim Burton, but Anderson lacks the narrative sophistication of the former and the visual imagination of the later and so what results is the worst version of both. The story is based upon the writings of Stefan Zweig, an Austrian author who was popular between the World Wars but had nevertheless received mixed reviews for his numerous works. Anderson’s story takes from some of the fictional and some of the autobiographical incidents in Zweig’s work and fashioned from them an abstract tale that attempts to make up for in humor what it decidedly lacks in artistry. I fully admit to finding these types of work distasteful because of the dearth of intellect they display, so it’s not that I don’t get it. But like a Jackson Pollack “artwork” or an Ornette Coleman “song,” Anderson’s “film” is utterly bereft of the kind of intellectual discipline that has informed genuinely great films from the inception of the art form. The fact that critics like it is almost a warning label for those who see film’s greatness as a narrative art being slowly eroded by the increasingly vacuous intellects of young filmmakers like Anderson.

The film begins with Tom Wilkinson as a famed author, talking about the tedious question of where an author’s stories come from. He states that, if one is willing to listen to others, the stories will come to the author. From there he relates his visit as a young man to the Grand Budapest Hotel in the fictional Eastern European country of Zubrowka. In the flashback the younger author is played by Jude Law. Curious one day about the appearance of an old man, F. Murray Abraham, he is told he is the owner of the hotel. In the baths the two strike up a conversation and over dinner Abraham tells Law the story of his life. In this flashback, the young Abraham is played by Tony Revolori who suddenly appears at the hotel as a Lobby Boy. The officious but charming concierge, Ralph Fiennes, at first dubious about his capabilities, nevertheless takes him under his wing and this sets Revolori off on numerous adventures that he experiences traveling in the wake of the eccentric hotel manager. This includes seducing wealthy old women like Tilda Swinton, confronting her son Adrien Brody and the family’s lawyer Jeff Goldblum over the will, talking himself out of an arrest by de facto Nazi Edward Norton, evading hit man Willem Dafor, escaping from prison with the aid of Harvey Keitel, and calling on the network of hotel managers led by Bill Murray to help him find the man responsible for his false arrest.

The film itself is highly stylized, with no real concession to realism in either the look or the narrative. This is done through the use of miniatures of exteriors of the hotel, and wide-angle lenses in the interiors. The colors are manipulated to give the film a faded, sepia-toned look to invoke the historical nature of the tale while the set design verges on a sort of steampunk aesthetic to go along with the surreal nature of the story. The real draw of the film seems to be the number of well-known actors in the piece, as well as the bizarre nature of the narrative. But while it was nominated for nine Academy Awards, the categories in which it won the Oscar are indicative of its failure as a captivating piece of filmmaking, winning for production design, costume design, hair and makeup, as well as the Eastern European folk music score by Alexandre Desplat. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how many big stars are in a film if they are given one-dimensional characters to portray in the screenplay. And that is certainly the case here. The characters are cartoons, mirroring the kind of graphic novel approach of the visuals. There are some funny lines, and some winning moments, which seems almost inevitable given the density of acting talent shoehorned into the film, but on the whole endeavor lies flat and curiously unengaging through most of its running time. The Grand Budapest Hotel will certainly have a lot of fans who have been weaned on Twitter feeds and YouTube videos, but I’m never going to be one of them.