Wes Anderson’s old world charmer

There’s a scene in Wes Anderson’s latest movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel, in which prisoners smuggle digging tools into jail inside fancy pastries made by a shop called Mendl’s. The trick is that the confections are so beautiful, the guards are reluctant to destroy them to search for hidden contraband. Similarly, Anderson’s movies are so beautiful to look at, so carefully constructed, we hate to dissect them too much.

The Grand Budapest is Anderson’s eighth film, and while critics have quibbled over the relative quality of some entries (The Life Aquatic and Darjeeling Limited get singled out for abuse), they have to concede he’s an original, with a painstaking attention to detail and eye for design, and a way with endearing characters.

His latest may be his greatest confection yet, with a standout performance by Ralph Fiennes, and you’d have to be a real churl to tear it apart and wonder aloud, what’s the big meaning here? Better to just bask in the rich colors and careful, symmetrical compositions and deadpan-witty dialogue.

Here, you also get a charming rake of a character, M. Gustave H, played by Fiennes, to root for. Gustave is the meticulous concierge of The Grand Budapest, one of those vast, ornate European hotels set in a mountainside somewhere near a war-zone border during the 1930s. He’s also a bit of a bounder, perfectly willing to supply his bodily services to the rich, aging widows who happily spend seasons at the Grand Budapest. One of them, Madame D (Tilda Swinton), also owns the hotel, and when she dies unexpectedly, she bequeaths Gustave… well, it’s a little unclear what exactly, but the concierge decides to settle for an oil painting of great sentimental value (“Boy with Apple”) which he smuggles out of the widow’s mansion with the help of lobby boy Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori). “I’ll never part with it,” Gustave tells Zero after the theft. Then, in the next moment: “On second thought, we should sell it on the black market, the sooner the better…”

What Gustave’s character offers, rendered in Fiennes’ crisply suave tones, is old world gentility, an insistence on politeness and charm in any situation, and an ambiguous sexuality. “You’re a real straight guy, Gustave,” a fellow prisoner later tells him. “I’ve never been accused of that before, darling,” Gustave replies archly.

This idea of excellence, of doing your job well, drives many of Anderson’s movies, from Max Fischer in Rushmore — a classic underachiever with grand designs — to Royal Tenenbaum’s chums Dusty and Pagoda who take him in when his ex-wife Etheline throws him out. There’s a sense of nobility in providing good service to others. Hotels also play a part in many of Anderson’s movies, as do trains. Someone should write a thesis on this.

Not only is The Grand Budapest Hotel Anderson’s most richly observed movie yet, it’s also the most expensive looking. While miniatures may account for most of the Art Nouveau funiculars and mountainside shots of the hotel, it’s the money spent on set design, interiors, costumes and locations that makes this an endless fascination to watch — the lighting, the framing, the obsession with signage (usually rendered in Anderson’s beloved Futura font, the same one used by Kubrick in his films). His frame compositions are as lavish as a children’s book. Design is key to his films, and the look and feel of his fictional hotel is based on real places such as Palace Bristol Hotel in Carlsbad, the Grandhotel Pupp in Czech Republic, and the Grandhotel Gellért in Budapest.

All of this eye candy makes The Grand Budapest Hotel fantastic to look at, but the other revelation here is that Anderson’s script actually takes a look at the real world for a change! There’s the looming threat of fascists overrunning the borders of Europe, post WWI, and when Gustave loses his cool and asks Zero why he came to his “civilized” country looking for a job, the young lobby boy confesses that he had to: he’s a war refugee. This quiet little glimpse into the situation facing Europe during this era lends Grand Budapest a context and humanitarian depth that many of his films, as artful and self-contained as they are, often lack.

Sure, we’re talking about a fictional country here called Zubrowka, and the fascists are never identified as being Nazis or anything else in particular (leave that to “historical” fiction like The Book Thief), but it’s this little tip of the hat to reality that lifts Grand Budapest beyond mere confection. It allows you to fully enjoy, with no guilt, the plot-driven antics that involve prison breaks and shootouts in the hotel and romantic merry-go-round rides and alpine ski chases. It allows you to have fun watching Anderson really cut loose on a canvas and landscape that’s even more vast than The Royal Tenenbaums’ faux Manhattan or The Life Aquatic’s undersea world.

Along for the fun are Anderson’s usual ensemble players Bill Murray (playing a helpful member of the Society of Crossed Keys), Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson and Bob Balaban, plus more recent alumni such as Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody and Ed Norton, and newbies Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe and  Saoirse Ronan as Agatha. But bigger roles go to F. Murray Abraham, who plays the older Moustafa, narrating the story of the Grand Budapest Hotel to a visiting writer played by Jude Law. As always, there’s a book involved, the one Law’s character will later write about the hotel, and its pages draw us into the story behind the story.

Behind Anderson’s own story is a certain Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jewish writer who is mentioned in the credits. Zweig was widely popular in the ‘20s and ‘30s, but fled his country during Hitler’s rise and ended up committing suicide with his wife in Rio De Janeiro in 1942, apparently despondent over the barbarism and upheaval afflicting Europe at the time. He died of a barbiturate overdose. “I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on Earth,” he wrote.

It’s this sense of eroding order and fading glory, and the pluck that drives certain refugees — like Gustave and Zero — to not only survive, but seek out pockets of humanity in an increasingly “barbaric world” that makes Anderson’s latest a much more compelling reflection on reality than its initial artifice might suggest.

Plus, it’s just a lot of fun to watch.