May 20: Grand Budapest Hotel (2014 -- Wes Anderson)

★★★★★

Grand Budapest Hotel has the technique, wit and insight that Wes Anderson has brought to his last several films.  We see the stiff tracking shots, formal compositions, bright color palette, stylized dialog and sharp intelligence that have become signature elements of his style.  Grand Budapest snaps with these.  But what’s interesting here is the way Anderson continues to tell stories with these elements while breaking new ground in his cinema.

Of all Anderson’s films, Grand Budapest most successfully incorporates the director’s stylistic elements in a consistent way by highlighting storytelling as a theme of the movie.  We start with a woman reading a book at the grave of an author and soon see a recording of the deceased author talking about his creative process, an introduction that communicates storytelling as an important part of the movie; the kid who keeps interrupting with a toy pistol foreshadows what we’re to see later, too.  Anderson though, in typical fashion, complicates this frame when the elderly author talks about a story he heard when he was young and the film then takes us to that moment in storytelling, the moment that the younger author is hearing the story of Gustave H. as told by the elderly Zero.  But there’s more.  Zero himself is recounting his own early life as Gustave’s protégé.  So Grand Budapest is a story told by an older writer, heard as a youth, from an older man who was talking about part of his own youth.  Or it’s all in the head of the woman who is reading graveside.  The movie is a dizzying regression of frames of stories recalled years after the narrators’ experiences.  These frames not only help account for Anderson’s characteristic foregrounding of narrative devices, but they also explain some of the content of the images we see on screen.

Storytelling, we’re told by the old author, is artifice, and Grand Budapest highlights the elements of cinematic storytelling.  An overlong tracking shot like that of Gustave and Zero crossing the hotel lobby makes us wonder how hard it was to choreograph the presence of various staff at just the right time while Gustave corrects bad behavior and continues his discourse.  It’s such a tour-de-force moment that it calls attention to itself.  Likewise, the film often uses obviously color-coordinated, symmetrical shots like the one of the pink Mendl’s truck in front of the pink hotel with its balanced lines of dark on both sides.  Anderson also elicits an artificial, mannered delivery from his actors and makes abrupt cuts from one scene to another, even using an iris at times, to create a movie that consistently directs attention to its narrative devices.

Another element of storytelling, point of view, also accounts for a lot of what we see on screen.  Zero’s perspective and storytelling dominate the film, and there are many visual elements that clearly have their origin in him.  For example, after learning of Madam D’s death, Gustave sends Zero on an errand, telling him to give the change to the “crippled shoeshine boy.” Right after Gustave’s line, the onscreen image flits momentarily to the shoeshine boy.  As my cinema bud, Lou, pointed out, this is just the sort of image that would register on the mind of a young kid.  Other parts of the storytelling in Grand Budapest have a similar origin.  The stop-motion animation of the ski chase could have its roots in a boy’s memory of 30s motion picture storytelling techniques, and the elaborate model of the hotel with its stiff funicular could come from the same recollection.  It’s not hard to imagine the colors, décor and immaculate dress as being partly in the memory of the young Zero either.

Recollections of the past tend to be tinged with nostalgia and a sense of decline, and since Grand Budapest is contained within two narrative frames of memories of lost youth, it’s not surprising to find decline as a theme here.  The film shows us an elegant, civilized culture in transition to something more base.  The ever-immaculate Gustave knows his role in this cultured civilization and works to keep it in place.  The hotel rules are formal and must be obeyed; even his role as gigolo to the wealthy, elderly patrons of the hotel is part of this same set of values.  Kiss, but don’t tell.  Grand Budapest, however, doesn’t tell us the story of an aristocratic society but rather the story of an order being undermined by something darker and less.  Madame D is killed, the lawyer is hunted down in a museum and gruesomely murdered, and people are beaten and shot.  A ruthless, fascist political order replaces the courtly aristocracy, and the Grand Budapest itself becomes first a barracks and then a battlefield.  Even the lawyer’s cat meets an untimely end.  And the décor of the hotel tells this same story of decline as the earlier scenes teem with art and color while the later ones take place in a Soviet-style establishment of indifferent service and cheap, dull, functional furnishings.  Grand Budapest is a tale of decline and loss.

In many ways, this film is the most pessimistic and violent in Anderson’s canon to date, but at the same time, the movie is making a statement about the value of art.  And storytelling is an art.  Art, in one point of view, gives us order from the disorder we actually live in; it gives us a way of seeing and understanding the world as having form and direction instead of being without.  The stories of Grand Budapest participate in that ordering, explaining to us how we got to the point we are at the film’s opening.  And the film even offers Gustave as an artist who uses form to combat chaos.  Gustave’s insistence on rules and formality are his effort make sense out of the world, but in a universe without real order, art ultimately fails.  As the older Zero says of Gustave, “To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he even entered it. But I must say, he maintained the illusion with grace.”  Grand Budapest gives us an artist who maintains form to counter chaos, and though the artist loses this fight, like all art does, he “maintains the illusion with grace” as long as he’s there.

Many people, including Anderson himself, have talked about the influences behind Grand Budapest, but Ernst Lubitsch is the clearest to me.  Lubitsch’s films faced fascism directly, and even before that, they dealt with social class, hypocrisy and oppression.  Lubitsch addressed these ills by using a uniquely light satire that skewered the darkness without being heavy handed or direct.  A similar satire underlies Grand Budapest, a satire that remains as light as a Mendl’s cake with some steel in middle to aid our escape.