Glad I Didn't Pay for This

Rating: 2/10 (24 January 2015)

Before I start, let me say I enjoyed The Royal Tenenbaums, so I didn't have any prior negative feelings about this director. When I heard how many awards this latest film was up for, and that the local library was having a free showing, I high-tailed it down. Wow -what a disappointment!I found this film depressing on many levels. The word that comes to mind is COWARDICE, fluffed up with CGI artifice. For starters, there were so many opportunities with the material that included issues of race, culture, class, sexual orientation, aging, war, etc. ALL of them missed! All of them treated with the same shallow-as-a-birdbath approach. I truly felt sorry for every actress in this film. They were all either grotesque gargoyles or saintly and scarred like Agatha. If you were to take all the lines collectively from every actress in this film, I've no doubt they'd easily fit on 1/2 sheet of paper. The ratio of women to men was worse than a Saturday Night Live cast list. That said, there was more genuine life in Tilda Swinton's 20 seconds than in the entire rest of the film! This was a new low for LOW emotion fans. The director was too timid to even penetrate the heavily perfumed facade of his main character. In the scene where he's been sprung from prison and is vomiting a racist diatribe on his underling's head, the latter responds by saying how war forced him to leave his country, after his family and town were destroyed. Suddenly Zero is a "refugee" and that magically causes Gustave to apologize profusely to him. Voilà! Zero becomes a Hero and aren't we glad we don't have to think about such nasty deep seated beliefs ever again! Similarly, the director appeared to have been too afraid to even use a real Nazi symbol in the hotel, instead going for some pseudo Art Deco/Fascist Lite look. Yes, some of the set design and outdoor CGI scenes were nice to look at but not for that long. I must have looked at my watch 7-8 times. Thankfully I saw it for free - I only regret I paid for parking!