Of crossed keys and lobby boys: 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' turns 10
Wes Anderson's film, featuring an expansive story and a massive cast, was a portending of things to come
The Grand Budapest Hotel arrived in theaters in March of 2014 — ten years ago next week — and was Wes Anderson’s eighth feature film, two years after Moonrise Kingdom and four years before Isle of Dogs.
An expansive feat of world-building, the film featured a massive cast, including several of Anderson’s perennials and Ralph Fiennes, appearing in his only Anderson film, at least until the recent Oscar-winning short The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.
The film brought the usual Wes Anderson aesthetic to Eastern Europe in the mid-20th century, with an expansive tale told with a complex flashback structure, with different elements based on the 1930s, 1960s, and 1980s.
This type of film, with a huge cast full of familiar faces and an expansive story, started with Moonrise Kingdom and is mostly what Anderson has been doing with his feature films in the decade since.
Since I’m mid-vacation, I thought I would re-post my original review of The Grand Budapest Hotel, which ran in March of 2014 at the late website TechnologyTell, where I was the entertainment editor. I’d say this was “reprinted with permission,” but it’s a long-defunct website owned by a company that itself no longer exists, so there’s no one to even ask permission from. So instead, consider this more “rescued from the Wayback Machine.”
Yes, it’s another Wes Anderson movie that’s whimsical, richly-detailed, and slightly skewed from reality, while also utilizing a wide cast of actors and dealing with themes of loss, melancholy and idealization of youth.
And thank goodness for that!
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” brings the general Anderson style and worldview to early-1930s Eastern Europe, set in a hotel that’s not in Hungary, but rather the fictional nation of Zubrowka. But in a European corollary to the 375th St. Y, the Nazis aren’t quite Nazis and World War II isn’t quite World War II. Oh, and the biggest heroes in the world are hotel concierges.
The plot, part of a three-part framing device that sort of adds a hazy poignancy to the proceedings, concerns the owner of the hotel as of the 1980s, Zero Mustafa (F. Murray Abraham) telling a story of his youth to the present-day concierge (Jude Law.)
Zero was young lobby boy at the hotel in the ’30s (played by newcomer Tony Revolori), a recently-arrived immigrant from somewhere in the Middle East, when he engaged in a series of adventures with the heroic concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes, a first-time Anderson actor who fits in very w]ell with the ensemble.) A much-loved hotel majordomo known for servicing- sometimes sexually- the older, wealthy female guests, Gustave gets caught up in some intrigue after one of those guests (Tilda Swinton) is murdered.
So it’s a caper, and an adventure and a comedy and a sad drama- all of it quintessentially Anderson.
The film is chock full of cameos, with highlights coming from Adrien Brody as Swinton’s son and Willem Dafoe as the family’s henchman, both of them delightfully evil. Other Anderson veterans pop up, from Jason Schwartzman to Owen Wilson to, of course, Bill Murray. Murray appears as a part of a wide-ranging brotherhood of concierges, in what is far and away the movie’s best idea.
Then there’s Harvey Keitel, playing a bald and shirtless prisoner, who now looks so much like Alan Arkin that it took me most of a scene to figure out which of them it was.
As always with Anderson, the style is just, enough to make me want to eagerly await the next edition of Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Wes Anderson Collection to see all of the background details.
Should Wes Anderson stop making these dollhouse-miniature projects and try something completely different? A part of me would like to see him try. But if he keeps making things as delightful as “Moonrise Kingdom” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” I’m not sure I want him to change.