The Grand Budapest Hotel - film review

First let me cite a glowing review that seems to represent the typical published response to Grand Budapest Hotel .  My own response, as you will see, was very different.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian wrote: This delirious operetta-farce is an eerily detailed and very funny work from the savant virtuoso of American indie cinema, Wes Anderson. It is set in the fading grandeur of a preposterous luxury hotel in an equally preposterous pre-war central European country, the fictional Zubrowka. This kind of milieu – the hotel spa or sanatorium occupied by mysterious invalids, chancers or impoverished White Russians – was loved by Thomas Mann and Vladimir Nabokov.

Ralph Fiennes is on glorious form as Monsieur Gustave, the legendary concierge of the Grand Budapest Hotel in the early 1930s: a gigantic edifice in the mountains. It's a cross between Nicolae Ceausescu's presidential palace in Bucharest and the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick's The Shining. It is a superb cathedral of eccentricity, with a gorgeous dining hall the size of a football field, a gasp-inducing canyon of a lobby area, with corridors and rooms encircling an exquisitely ornate galleried central space.

Gustave is energetic and exacting, taking a passionate pride in the high standards of his establishment and ruling the staff with a rod of iron. Like them, he is kitted out in a Ruritanian purple livery which matches the hotel's decor. Gustave affects an air of genial worldliness and deferential intimacy with the hotel's grander clientele, and despite the quasi-military correctness of his bearing in dealing with his subordinates, Gustave can also lapse into high-camp familiarity with the guests. Fiennes is absolutely brilliant.

Gustave decides to mentor the hotel's vulnerable lobby boy, orphan immigrant Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori). It is to Zero that Gustave reveals the engine that drives his hotel's wellbeing: his ready, enthusiastic appetite for servicing the intimate needs of thousands of aristocratic old ladies who come back every year.

Guests are greeted at the hotel's reception desk, 1932.

Gustave H in the centre and Zero on the right 

Gustave's greatest amour is the ancient and cantankerous Madame D, played by Tilda Swinton with wrinkly prosthetics and strange pale-blue contacts. The infatuated Madame D infuriates her sinister son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) by leaving Gustave, in her will, a priceless Renaissance portrait belonging to her family. Gustave is thus to face the family's fanatical attempts to disinherit this counter jumper, involving her butler, Serge (Mathieu Amalric) and Zero's courageous fiancee, Agatha (Saoirse Ronan), who works in the local Viennese-style patisserie. And there are numerous other cameos for all Anderson's repertory players.

As ever, Anderson's world is created like the most magnificent full-scale doll's house; his incredible locations, interiors and old-fashioned matte-painting backdrops sometimes give the film a look of a magic-lantern display or an illustrated plate from a book.

Alexandre Desplat's score keeps the picture moving at an exhilarating canter, and the script, co-written by Anderson and his longtime collaborator Hugo Guinness is an intelligent treat. Watching this is like taking the waters in Zubrowka. A deeply pleasurable immersion.

A more balanced review was Carljoe Javier's in GMA News who wrote those familiar with Wes Anderson are familiar with his distinct visual aesthetic - striking colour palettes, formalistically disciplined framing and a clear sense of it being a crafted piece of art. Anderson’s work does not ever attempt realism, but rather he tell fantastic stories (with or without elements of fantasy and the absurd) that communicate so much about the characters' humanity. That being said, some viewers might find the Anderson aesthetic to be overwrought, pretentious and even intolerable.

Now my own views. Perhaps I am at a disadvantage, not knowing Wes Anderson’s cinema history. I went to see the film Grand Budapest Hotel because I love a] the old Habsburg cities, b] art deco hotels and c] resorts that used to provide cultural outlets for residents during their summer holidays. So the setting in time (the 1932?) and place (Republic of Zubrowka hmm..Vienna?) was a strange basis for the story of a hotel concierge who teamed up with a junior hotel worker to prove his innocence on a murder charge.

The hotel's salon was very grand in 1932,
a "superb cathedral of eccentricity"

The photography and sets in this film are truly gorgeous. I loved the hotel architecture and decoration, the fincular, baths, dining room, furniture, trams, palaces, snowy mountains, cable cars, palaces and especially the very Habsburg-looking Kunstmuseum. Klimt was used perfectly. Of course the sets were all too decadent for current taste, but then Gustave belonged much more to the late 19th century than to the 1930s, I suspect.

But the gun scenes and chases were too silly for words. Zero helping Gustave escape from Zubrowka's prison by sending stone­mason’s tools hidden inside cakes made by the fiancée Agatha was even sillier. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle reviewed the film saying that the film's sad undertone saves The Grand Budapest Hotel from its own zaniness. Or better yet, elevates the zaniness, making it feel like an assertion of some right to be silly, or some fundamental human expression. Mr LaSalle was almost right. The film’s sad under­tone did save Grand Budapest Hotel from some of its own silliness, but the silliness remained.

The link between this film and Stefan Zweig’s writing, as mentioned in the film credits, was unclear to me. Then I had a brain wave! In 1942, the Zweigs were found dead of a barbiturate overdose in their Brasilian house. Zweig had been despairing at the future of Europe and its culture. He wrote "I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which int­el­lectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom.. the highest good on Earth".

I now agree with Tim Stanley of The Daily Telegraph - the European upper-crust was subversive! The film director understood that the elegance of the Grand Budapest was just a façade; that beneath the glitter was the cancer of greed and fascism. If that was true, Wes Anderson was more clever and worthwhile than I thought. Viva Stefan Zweig!