I love the smell of Wes Anderson in the morning. Less so in the evening; it feels too mannered then, and too intricate. In the morning, though, when I'm at my freshest, I'm enchanted by his clipped direction and layered narratives, and the way he uses artifice to smooth the jagged edges of the raw human emotion that tends to lie at the heart of his stories.
The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson at his finest, and richly deserving of the four Oscars it won, the five it was nominated for but didn't and, frankly, a bunch it wasn't nominated for at all - How Ralph Fiennes was overlooked for best actor is a particular mystery to me.
I suppose I'd better add the usual disclaimer here - if you haven't liked Wes Anderson's movies before, this probably won't be the one to convert you. He's probably the most distinctive director of our generation, and Grand Budapest Hotel doesn't bring anything stylistically new to the table. He's the master of magic realism, and here this is applied to a tall tale about a legendary hotel concierge, nestled like a rare bird's egg beneath two separate layers of hearsay.
Our eyes and ears for the main story belong to one Zero Moustafa (played as a youth by Tony Revolori), the lobby boy at the titular establishment. He has no education and no experience, but his sole dream seems to be to work at the Grand Budapest and for M. Gustave, the concierge (Ralph Fiennes), this is the only truly relevant point. Gustave is a master of his trade, bringing wealthy customers back summer after summer with his winning combination of charm, sexual favours and a truly superb knack for a well-turned expletive.
For a while, things continue happily enough, until the untimely demise of one particularly happy customer leaves Gustave with a vast inherited fortune and several murderously miffed relatives to contend with. A trip to view the body leaves both Gustave and Zero in a whole world of trouble, and one which will require every single one of the many resources at the truly talented concierges' disposal to escape intact.
It's beautiful to look at (of course) with an impeccably elegant soundtrack (of course) and a script that quietly, bluntly rips your heart open at the fundamental sadness of the human condition. Nobody writes a lost soul like Anderson, but in Gustave he finds a true hero - it took me about two sentences to fall in love with him and I'm sure I can't have been the only one.
For those of us who are already true believers, here's the reassurance you may have been seeking. Yes, you will see Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody, although only the last of these has more than a cameo. This is Fiennes' show, primarily, even if, as a crazed assassin, Willem Dafoe does his damnedest to steal it.
...Listen, just watch the bloody movie already. If you don't like it, fine, you fail at being a human being, but at least you'll have tried.
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