The Grand Budapest Hotel is a wonder

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With the Oscars coming up again, I’ve finally started to catch up with some of the films nominated last year — starting with The Grand Budapest Hotel. I’ve known about Wes Anderson for a while now, he’s almost a household name at this point, but for whatever reason it took me until last weekend to finally see any of his films, and I wasn’t disappointed. The Grand Budapest Hotel is hardly a universally appealing movie, but if this is the type of film you like — I think you’ll really love it.

The most difficult thing to put into words about this movie is probably its spirit– it jumps spastically from funny, to mean, to melancholy, and then back to funny again. The story is equally ridiculous, with elements of a caper film, a documentary, and a drama, but yet still feels deeply character driven. The easiest way to describe this film would be quirky, but I feel like that’s coming at it too shallowly. It is quirky, but it’s purposefully so. This is a film that wants to do a lot of things, it wants to tell a personal story with some grander implications, it wants to evoke a wide spread of emotions, it wants me to laugh, it wants me to feel for it’s characters, and it wants to make me think. It feels less like Anderson is making a weird film for the sake of making a weird film, but more that he’s making a quirky film because a quirky tone is the only way to contextualize such a wide array of ideas and emotions. It feels almost like it’s animated — it manages to make such an absurd spread of goals feel cohesive because it takes place in a world implicitly unlike ours.

A lot of this has to do with the genius framing device. The movie opens with a short scene of a women in modern day sitting on a bench reading a book by an older, dead author, and the camera pans to reveal that this book is The Grand Budapest Hotel. There’s a transition, and we’re now in the book, seeing the author give a short monologue, before he begins telling the story. This story, however, is the story of another person — who told the author his story. So, this is the story of a woman reading a book about an author retelling a story he was told about the childhood of someone he had the chance to interview. Once you understand this, the whole tone of the film starts to make sense. This film isn’t just about it’s explicit story – about Zero, Gustav, and the Grand Budapest Hotel, it’s implicitly about storytelling itself. It’s about how, over time, stories change. As stories are passed from one person to another, they become more and more exaggerated, depending on how we understand and interpret them. This isn’t a movie about Zero and Gustav’s stories, it’s about a woman experiencing an exaggerated,  distorted version of this story. It’s about this story through the frame of Zero’s memories, and through the frame of the author’s artistic interpretation, and then again through the frame of the woman’s own conception of the author’s telling of this story. More than that maybe, it’s about the beauty Anderson manages to find in these muddled layers of subjectivity.

This is a gorgeous film, and just like the tone, it becomes even better once you consider the film is framed. Oftentimes, it feels like a moving storybook — Anderson has a breathtaking way of creating these pseudo two-dimensional shots. Everything is obsessively placed to create a mind-bending sensation of flatness, and it all goes towards creating the sensation of looking at things through the frame of someone’s imagination. A lot of scenes are framed using beautiful little miniatures, which is how Anderson so fully succeeds in creating such unique locations and sets. Of course, the directing is awesome on a normal layer too, the actors all do a fantastic job, and it’s just wonderful watching how they interact with these sets. They mesh so seamlessly with the unique geometry of the world this movie creates, it’s perfect.

This movie is fantastic in a lot of conventional ways as well. It has snappy pacing, and moves from point to point gracefully. Largely because of how the film is framed, it manages to make me laugh just moments after it made me really feel something. The story wraps up in a satisfyingly melancholy way, before drawing back and leaving it’s many framing devices behind.

And when that curtain finally dropped, I couldn’t help but just sit there for a moment. Not so much because the movie left me in awe, just because it was so engrossing. It has such a unique feeling about it, that it takes a moment to come back to reality afterwards.

Even now, with a few days to think on it, there’s not really anything I don’t like in this movie. There’s a moment or two that maybe go a little bit too far, and I’m sure if I really picked through it I’d be able to find some sort of flaw, but in the end, none of that really matters. As a piece of media, I think this movie is pretty much as close to perfection as you can get, and it only gets better the more I think about it. That being said, this is a weird movie, and if you’re the type who can’t enjoy anything unconventional, this probably isn’t for you. If you’re cool with something more experimental, or just want to try something different, I can’t recommend this enough — it’s a fantastic movie.