Grand Budapest: A completely non-vapid exercise in style

Rating: 9/10 (12 June 2016)

Excluding Uwe Boll, Wes Anderson has likely the most distinct visual style in modern film. His set-pieces brim with colour and detail, yes, but his most obvious stylistic abnormality resides in the presentation of his bijou quirks to the audience. Instead of intensely revealing all that is going on in a scene with a single brutally long tracking shot - a la Inarritu -- Anderson opts instead for the short and sweet, a usually center-framed ground- level shot with a large depth of field that moves only on a rail, pivot, or gratuitous zoom. If it were anyone other than Anderson behind the wheel, the film that adopted this style would surely devolve into monotonous repetition by the ten-minute mark.
But then you have something like this:
You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that's what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant... oh, f*** it.
And that is precisely why I love Wes Anderson. His dialogue, and for that matter, his set-pieces and even the most trivial of details are all imbued with joyous irreverence, narrative glee, and fantastic explosion of shapes and colours that even the most CGI-encrusted extravaganzas couldn't even come close to comparison. At times, his visual style becomes the substance of the film that carries it from scene to scene, never allowing the film to segue into monotony.
The plot itself is an afterthought compared to the film's visual euphoria. However, the performances, specifically Fiennes', are not. Fiennes plays M. Gustave, the legendary proprietor of The Grand Budapest Hotel, who is charged with the murder of the woman (Tilda Swinton) who left him a priceless painting, Boy with Apple. Fiennes exploits his character's wide spectrum of comportment -- from surprising eloquence to equally surprising vulgarity -- with meticulous skill, charmingly deadpan in every single line he delivers.
The film is a jumble of quirks and lightness until its conclusion. It suddenly takes a sombre tone, ending on a rather heavy note. Anderson is able to pull off this tonal shift by maintaining his unique style throughout, but the ending is effective in itself. It leaves the audience simultaneously satisfied and sad, urging them to think about the implications of what they have just witnessed: a lovely film built around a madcap style that explores the extent of the narrative, the pure act of storytelling itself, and the outer reaches of what we call empathy.