The hotel as humanity’s last stand
Wes Anderson uses the faded glories of a European inn to explore larger themes
He’s such a precocious and childlike director, it’s no wonder Wes Anderson wanted to rewrite The Rules of the Game with a box of crayons.
The man who made Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore has a thing for characters who can’t quite make it up the mountain of adulthood, and as a result, sit and ponder the perceived insanity around them.
That’s how kids see the grown- up world — and it’s how Anderson’s central characters tend to behave over the course of their predictably quirky and dependably amusing misadventures.
For Zero ( Tony Revelori), the central innocent in The Grand Budapest Hotel, that means bearing witness to the war years in Europe, the rise of fascism and brutal decline of compassion and human worth.
It also means making a valiant last stand against the forces of untidy rudeness because when things go wrong, places like the Grand Budapest Hotel become the last fortress for kindness, courtesy and clean linen.
Granted, a pillow adorned with a mint may not have a huge impact on the political reality, but it makes an unpleasant situation a hint jollier, which is the concierge’s raison d’être and Monsieur Gustav’s ( Ralph Fiennes) way of life.
A hotelier who knows every secret and politely scratches every client’s itch with the utmost discretion, Monsieur Gustav is a fixture at the Grand Budapest Hotel until clouds of war gather, and the forces of politesse are crushed beneath a police state.
Gustav becomes a concierge without a hotel, which is a little like being a man without a country, allowing Anderson to create a metaphor for war and statelessness that always feels forced, but nonetheless registers as funny.
Watching Fiennes play Gustav, the gifted concierge who refuses to let war tarnish his bell, is like watching a master painter at work. His face carries the weight of every moral lapse he’s forced to watch, yet he never loses his composure.
It’s a thin line that separates civility from anarchy, and Anderson draws it on the face of his film like a wormy moustache so we can see how surreal, even stupid, our gestures appear in his trademark funhouse mirror.
It’s clever, and thanks to Fiennes and the inspired production design, it’s a whole lot of fun. But it’s also flat — apparently by design.
Anderson shoots everything square to the lens. Faces, buildings, funiculars are all framed for the facade, which ensures a two- dimensional quality throughout that starts to feel overly stylized — but still makes a salient point about the importance of appearance.
In truth, we are shallow creatures and have a tendency to smell. Back in the day, we could all rely on the omniscient concierge who saw all the ugliness and masked it with a subtle spritz of musky cologne.
But those Grand Hotel days are gone, and in Anderson’s comic obituary, it’s not just the palatial buildings that have fallen into disrepair, but the very essence of humanity itself, which continues to sleep in dirty sheets with the curtains closed.