Elaborate, Funny.

Rating: 7/10 (28 December 2014)

The writer/director Wes Anderson seems to have translated the story directly from Stefan Zweig's German, except for a few more or less modern interpolations, like "F*** you." Really, it begins in the Grand Manner, with someone telling a story to someone else, that is then illustrated in the following scenes, much like Marlowe in "The Heart of Darkness," missing one intermediary, I think. And Henry James in "The Turn of the Screw." It must have been a powerful convention of the time, around the turn of the century.
The translated prose that comes to us is phrased in elegance, very formal and dignified, like the Grand Budapest Hotel itself in its fashionable early years, a stately pleasure dome, all pink gingerbread, perched on a mountain top, accessible only by funicular railways. (No riff raff allowed.) I'm afraid I missed the middle part so I can't spell out the story. I don't think I could anyway because it's not exactly linear. There are lots of characters, all somewhat cockeyed, and many incidents, some briefly violent.
But if the story of the little lobby boy who grows up to be F. Murray Abraham isn't linear, the direction certainly is. I've never in my life seen a more SYMMETRICAL movie, a more CARPENTERED movie. Forget about traditional reverse angle shots, in which two people are speaking and the camera alternates from peeping over one shoulder to peeping over the other. Everybody looks and speaks straight into the lens.
The settings are equally stylized. You want to see a huge dining room? You see it framed from the entrance, each side mirroring the other. The chandeliers are equidistant. When people walk or run past the camera, or away from it, or towards it, they seem to do it on x and y axes, as if the scene were the solution to a problem in calculus. There's no other film quite like it.
Yet it's funny too. Near the beginning, when there is breaking news, we see a succession of local newspapers. The names of the newspapers run along lines like "The Middle European Star" and so forth, and one of them, which gets no special treatment, is "The Continental Drift." The dialog sometimes descends from formalized and ornate into the vulgate. It doesn't happen often but when it does, it's a surprising and refreshing break from all those sumptuous phrases.
I look forward to catching the part I missed.