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A Miscellany of Wonderful Things in Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel

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So: Wes Anderson. His movies play tricks on me — sometimes the one I like immediately doesn’t quite resonate with me later, like Rushmore. And others leave me a bit detached at first but I come to appreciate them later, like The Darjeeling Limited. I’m not sure where The Grand Budapest Hotel will sit on the continuum. I enjoyed it as I watched it and really enjoyed the farcical feel of it at the beginning, but felt unexpectedly moved at the end. But I can say I quite liked these things about it — and expect to if I re-watch the movie years or months later.

1. It is Fun to See Ralph Fiennes Play a Character with Some Buoyancy

Sometimes I don’t know why I like Ralph Fiennes as an actor so much, because he usually plays such loathsome characters. His career has always fascinated me. He started off as a kind of golden boy in Quiz Show and starred in Maid in Manhattan with that great thespian Jennifer Lopez, but since then, he specializes in characters with a kind of negative charisma — really twisted, dark and spiritually runty underneath that classically handsome-y veneer. (And didn’t he play Hades in those semi-horrid Titan movies? Unleash the kraken!) It’s fascinating to have followed an actor who seemed poised for one kind of career and ended up veering in a different direction.

But I kind of think he’s kind of at his best in The Grand Budapest Hotel. He plays Gustave, the concierge of the grand hotel in question with a yen for beguiling and bedding wealthy older women. He uses his natural seriousness as an actor to give his character the kind of high opinion, self-importance yet honorable sense of duty that characterizes so-called “aristocratic servants.” But he also just seems to be having a ball with the witty dialogue, the matter-of-fact libido, the twee costumes and all the goddamn swearing. (Seriously, it’s so awesome when he just sighs, “Oh, fuck it!”) In a way, it’s a bit how you’d imagine Wes Anderson himself would be: the same almost fussy precision in service of a higher ideal, the same seriousness yet ability to be light on the feet, the same fine appreciation and attentiveness to a very particular type of vanishing beauty.

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2. Genius Costuming, and the Creative Tension Between Real and Fake History

Being a master of mise-en-scene, Anderson has always paid sharp attention to his costuming, and Grand Budapest Hotel really kinds of ups the ante in his evolving catalog of movies. Mostly because he’s collaborating with the legendary costume designer Milena Canonero lately, who also did films like Marie-Antoinette and Barry Lyndon. The fashion in something like The Royal Tenenbaums is more relatable (and perhaps more immediately inspiring) — like everyone else, who didn’t want to wear a Lacoste tennis dress with a fur coat and an Hermes handbag like Gwynnie Paltrow? That was great styling there.

But good costuming is not just character styling, and it’s kind of fun to see Wes Anderson do something vaguely “historic.” Of course, it’s fake history, a kind of faux-nostalgic take on Mitteleuropa, but also not — the film’s inspired by the writings of an Austro-Jewish writer, Stefan Zweig, who observed the rise of the Nazis during his time. And so you see analogues instead of historical recreations, as you would in a typical costume drama — the Nazis aren’t Nazis, they’re something else, but the long, strict lines of the frock coat tell you so much about the uptight, sinister fascism of the fake-Nazis.

The schism between the fake history and the actual historical analogues works brilliantly — it allows the film to stay light on its feet in terms of plot and tone, so that the historical resonances feel more like playing around or riffing on possibility. But then the film’s end actually gains a profound sadness — I don’t want to spoil it for you — because it’s a reflection of the actual loss of liberty and destruction of the past that happened with the Nazis. It’s carried over in the costuming, which feels whimsical and playful in that Anderson way — but also with a kind of darkness and menace that feels different in the context of the usual Wes Anderson emotional palette. Anderson has longed for the past in his other previous films, but the longing for the past in Grand Budapest goes beyond nostalgia or twee Americana — it’s for a kind of political innocence.

(Also: please let “Lobby Boy” be a hot Halloween costume for 2014. Calling it now!)

3. It is Fun to See Wes Anderson Stretch Himself

I can’t remember where I read or heard it, but I remember someone saying that Wes Anderson is an inherently conservative filmmaker. Not politically speaking, but conservative artistically, and even trapped by his own stylistic preferences. I can see how that could be true — sometimes his films are so visually strong, composed and precise that emotional realism doesn’t feel at home in his images, and interestingly enough, the moments of great feeling in his films often emerge more from his use of music and camera movement than a close-up on an actor’s face.

But for someone with a very strong visual signature style, I think he’s been stretching himself in different ways in certain films. I thought The Darjeeling Limited was his most nakedly emotional grappling with grief and abandonment, as well as a tricky engagement — not always successful — with another culture. And he was able to deal surprisingly frankly with young adolescent sexuality and yearning in Moonrise Kingdom without feeling too exploitative.

Many have pointed at Grand Budapest’s unexpectedly black humor and moments of explicit violence as new elements in Anderson’s palette, and it’s true that seeing those moments were a little shocking, especially in this bon-bon box of a movie. But for me, the real stretch was seeing this oblique sense of history underneath the almost slapstick story. There’s always been an undertow of melancholy in Anderson’s work, but it’s delicately, lightly yet undeniably connected to a very real historical situation. Some will argue that dressing it up in a fake name and costuming it in play clothes minimizes it — and I can see that argument for sure. But maybe perhaps that’s the only way Anderson’s world of whimsy and playfulness can integrate real-world politics in a way that doesn’t violate his style and storytelling, especially for a filmmaker with those paramount priorities in his work. I don’t ever think Wes will be a “political” filmmaker in a straightforward sense, but his work does gain more emotional richness from bringing those elements in, and I hope he continues to grapple with it in future movies.

There’s so much else that fascinated me in Grand Budapest Hotel — Tilda Swinton’s weirdly surreal aging makeup, the lack of pop songs in the score, Saoirse Ronan’s whole state of beingness — but I think the film’s a worthy addition to the Anderson canon, and it makes me look forward to what he’ll do next to keep challenging himself.

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