Working with independent producers on relatively low budgets, Wes Anderson, never a shrinking violet when it comes to making movies on his own terms, has become a liberated filmmaker. His 2012 film “Moonrise Kingdom,” a sweet story of adolescent first love set against a background of pain and loss, is set in 1965 in a fictitious New England island community that undergoes vast geographical—and moral—changes by way of a quasi-Biblical, quasi-apocalyptic catastrophe. Now, in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” he leapfrogs back from the present day to 1985, 1968, and, ultimately, to 1932, to tell a story of work and art, friendship and love that is about the rise of Nazism and the German occupation of much of Europe—in particular, one small, no-longer-extant Central European country, Zubrowka, where the hotel of the title is located.
Perhaps more than ever, Anderson takes a joyful yet aching delight in recreating the styles of bygone days. The hotel is like a majestically confected cake on the outside and a jewel box on the inside, adorned with staff and guests whose uniforms and fashions are nuanced to the buttons, and whose behavior is self-controlled to the glance. Yet also, more than in any of his other films, that very recreation is his subject. “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is about the spiritual heritage and the political force of those long-vanished styles—about the substance of style, not just the style of his Old World characters but also, crucially, Anderson’s own. This isn’t Anderson’s most personal film, in the strict sense, but it is, alongside “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” his most reflexive one—even more so because the new film exposes the inner workings not just of his practice of filmmaking but of his sensibility.
When I interviewed Anderson in 2009, for a Profile in the magazine, about his ideas for a political film, he said:
In his new film, Anderson has done the opposite: he has deepened the politics of the movie through his layers of fantasy. The movie begins in the present day, when a young reader renders a sign of homage at a monument to the author of a book called “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Flashback to 1985, when the book is published and the elderly author does an on-camera interview about it—interrupted by a playful child. From there, a flashback to 1968 features the author as a younger man, and as a guest at the hotel of the title. It’s a desolate and slovenly hulk, with the veneer of Soviet-era prefab décor failing to conceal its inner decay. There, the writer encounters another man of a certain age—the owner of the hotel (F. Murray Abraham), who invites the writer to dinner in the cavernous and empty dining room and tells the story, set in 1932, of how he came to own the hotel.
As much as the movie’s location is a fictional country, the years of the action are also fictional: his 1985 maps loosely onto a post-1989, post-Iron Curtain moment; the film’s 1968 action has no connection to the May events but rather hints at the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that summer; and he sets the central action in 1932, though, in fact, Hitler came to power only in 1933 and began military incursions in 1938. Anderson’s intentions are apparent: to create a historical model that filters out specifics in order to consider in isolation, as if in a scientific experiment, essential yet unfamiliar elements of the times, and to show their enduring force in the present day. The story’s nested historical framework isn’t just a telescope to provide perspective on distant times; it’s also a mirror to reflect their lessons ahead to us.
The fictitious 1932 finds the hotel in full glory, under the authority of its suavely domineering, exquisitely disciplined concierge, Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes); he runs the daily operations with seemingly omniscient attention to detail, unimpeachably exquisite taste, and tactful judgment. He is, in effect, the ultimate connoisseur, and his connoisseurship extends not just to furnishings and cuisine (in a cinephile joke, he exhibits a preference for wine that goes by the name of Louis Jouvet) but to social graces, personal manners, and even sex. (The latter mostly involves him with the wealthy elderly women who are guests at the hotel, rendering him something of a gigolo but also, he confesses, affording him real pleasure.)
The hotel is the embodiment of Gustave’s taste, and Gustave is the embodiment of its delights. It’s a state of affairs that matches Anderson’s own art: the virtual signature that’s present like a watermark throughout his work is also a part of his personal style, his dress and his manner, his very way of life. That’s why I’ve compared him to such high stylists as Howard Hawks and Ernest Hemingway, who similarly exhibited in person the extreme stylistic precision of their work. The artist isn’t just the creator of style but also its bearer, and the artist’s very presence is a work of art in person, creation on the wing by means of a turn of phrase, a gesture, a way of dressing, the aura of charismatic influence.
Gustave is also a connoisseur of people, and that’s the spark of the story: his adoption, as a sort of disciple, of the hotel’s new lobby boy, Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori), a dark-skinned refugee from war in the Middle East. Just as Gustave’s intimate life is inseparable from his public role, so he recruits Zero for a personal adventure that reveals the fiber of Gustave’s theatrical demeanor. Gustave’s elderly lover and client (Tilda Swinton) dies. Anticipating an inheritance, Gustave takes Zero along to the family castle for the reading of the will. There, he is bequeathed a famous painting; but when the results are contested by her craven son (Adrien Brody) and his brutish bodyguard (Willem Dafoe), the concierge and the lobby boy manage to steal it.
Their expedition puts them in contact with the equivalent of Nazi officers, and when they challenge Zero’s papers, Gustave, with unflagging loyalty, mounts, in effect, a one-man resistance operation. The social comedy morphs into an action-adventure story, replete with romance (between Zero and a young pastry chef, played by Saoirse Ronan) and danger (a snowy alpine chase is an antic allusion to Germany’s classic mountain-film genre). The characters’ steadfast bonds of friendship and love join with the peculiar fraternity of a guild of concierges—in effect, the stage directors of the region’s great hotels, and Gustave’s counterparts in connoisseurship—to save the day (in the narrow terms of what can be rescued in the face of historic depravity).
There are two last wills-and-testaments at the center of “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” One of them is the movie’s McGuffin, the object that sets in motion the grandly turbulent span of comic action. The other never makes a physical appearance, but it’s the sine qua non for the movie’s backstory—or, rather, its frontstory, the surprising results of the 1932 drama that turn out to explain the events of the three later timeframes. The first, the source of trouble, is a mad quest for a legal document; the second, the root of a great legacy and a noble legend, is the keeping of a promise.
The words given, in friendship and in love—the recognition of kindred souls of refinement and judgment, self-control and dignity, aesthetic taste and the will to realize it—appear here as the very soul of a moral politics that transcends accidents of circumstance and particular historical incidents. The story, of the lost grandeur of a hotel that is restored and perpetuated by way of a book, is also the story of a tradition of personal nobility—a severe and self-imposed code of conduct that proves, in the face of historically terrifying and catastrophic trouble, to be a rock of steadfast decency. That tradition, in turn, is preserved and perpetuated in art: “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is the closest thing to a credo, a discourse of principle, that Anderson has yet offered.
