A delightfully absurd Ruritanian romance from Wes Anderson

Rating: 8/10 (13 March 2014)

Wes Anderson makes films that aren't like the films of anyone else. That may or may not be a good thing, depending on whether you 'get' them. I've always felt his films were like live action versions of the cartoons in 'The New Yorker'; sometimes they're funny, most of the time they're clever and always they seem to be designed for the intelligentsia. Perhaps that's why Wes Anderson's films don't make lots of money or win Oscars. Even the 'intellectual' New York comedies of Woody Allen have a wider appeal, not that their films have a great deal in common except, perhaps, their 'smartness'. Although "The Grand Budapest Hotel" has secured a multiplex release I doubt if it will wow them in Des Moines which is a pity since this is a film of considerable charm and a good deal of wit. OK, it's hardly laugh-out-loud funny but I had a silly grin on my face from start to finish. Like all his films it's set in what we might call 'Andersonland', a totally fabricated country made up of scraps from his favourite fiction, in this case the writings of Stefan Zweig who gets a special dedication at the end. It's literary in that words matter a great deal and play an important part in the development of the story and it's a film in which stories are crucial, (it's divided, like a novel, into chapters). Indeed, the story that makes up the body of the film is told as a story within a story begun by elderly author Tom Wilkinson informing us of how he first met the owner of the The Grand Budapest Hotel many years before when we was a young writer, (played by Jude Law), and the owner was an old man, (an excellent F Murray Abraham), who in turn tells the story of when he was a mere lobby boy, (newcomer Tony Revolori), under the tutelage of the hotel's concierge and the films central character, M Gustave, (a superb comic performance from Ralph Fiennes). It's when we get back to this point in time that the dimensions of the screen change from today's customary widescreen to the box-like dimensions of '30's cinema. It's as if Anderson is paying tribute, not just to writers like Zweig, but to film-makers like Ernst Lubitsch as this is a Ruritanian romance set in the kind of Mitteleuropa so beloved of Lubitsch and others of the period. All it lacks are the characters periodically bursting into song. If the film doesn't quite live up to its predecessors such as "The Royal Tenenbaums" or "The Life Aquatic" I think it's because there's no emotional commitment to the characters, It's too skittish, too self- consciously smart to draw us in. On the other hand it looks amazing. The hotel itself is like a giant cake that the baker in the film, M Mendl, might have made, and then there's always that extraordinary cast to keep us entertained. The film reads like a Who's Who, not just of Anderson regulars, but of moviedom's best character actors. None of them are, of course, remotely 'realistic', not even Fiennes. They remain the stock characters we find in those 'New Yorker' cartoons but they remain good company nevertheless. One thing is guaranteed, of course; you won't find anything else like it, at least not until Anderson makes his next movie.