A Masterpiece From Beginning to End

Rating: 10/10 (27 August 2014)

Sometimes, if you want to know if certain films are worth watching, you have to rely on which cast is involved. Great actors are usually into great projects. This case is no different. The cast is outstanding, and the list is long, from F. Murray Abraham, Tilda Swinton, Jude Law, the always brilliant Willem Dafoe, Edward Norton, and so on and so forth. And then Ralph Fiennes, complete king of the show, simply spectacular in every bit of it. Wes Anderson, who directed "Life Aquatic"( 2004), or "The Royal Tenenbaums" (2001) is back with this little big project. And it is so because it is an intimate story, yet embedded in a large scale game play, a massive project from an artistic point of view; every character and event is paramount in this little poem. This "Chinese box" kind of filmmaking, a story within a story, is what Anderson uses to tell us this tale. It is a classic literary device, and like in literature, it might involve the same issue, namely the narrator reliability, (though in the film the veracity of the events is emphasized), so everything could be a wild imagination from the narrator, which may be even better for the purpose of the whole thing. I'm sticking with the latter, because at the end of the day, a good story is a good story, whether it is more or less believable, right? A writer (Jude Law) begins this tale, telling us how in his young days, he stayed in the decadent "Grand Budapest Hotel", and met the owner, Mr. Mustapha (F. Murray Abraham), who will tell him how he acquired the hotel, back in the glorious days.
What can we highlight in this movie? The cast is amazing, such a bunch of superstars, all of them inspired and enjoying the show. Photography is great, colors, lighting, everything...there is an important amount of detail in production, from the hotel itself in its different stages to the wardrobe, music, visuals and introduction of each chapter. The pace is pitch perfect, a seamless tale that even in a sequence of flashbacks keep the whole together, and so do the actors, follow the lead of Anderson in a way that every single character, every line is nailed, both in performance and rhythm. That is writing, in this case a screenplay, and definitively, that is filmmaking at its best. This is the best Anderson movie so far, is cohesive, compact, it is a exquisite piece of work, both in form and content, his masterpiece. Honestly, "The Grand Budapest Hotel" is a must-see, a film I strongly recommend not only because of its quality, but because it reminds us that there is always, always a story worth telling.