Grand Budapest Hotel

Director: Wes Anderson
Year: 2014

Wonderfully colorful and whimsical, loaded with cracking dialogue and ridiculous characters, The Grand Budapest Hotel has perched itself as an excellent alternative to the field of much darker candidates in this years crowded Best Picture race. This is a story about the power of stories and the importance of listening for them. For, as we are told early on by Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), great storytellers do not, in fact, labor over the creation of their stories incessantly, they simply wait for people to spill them. And cult hero/Director Wes Anderson delightfully spills this one all over us.

Costume, set design, and cinematography are all under Anderson’s watchful and brilliant guidance here, with delightful twists, turns and surprises in every frame. If it were style for the sake of itself, which, admittedly, I have felt about some of Anderson’s earlier work, it would be distracting. But everything adds up here. Every actor, and it is a who’s who list, has a strong, distinctive and story-or-style-driving role to play and each crushes it – even when it’s little more than a line or two. Newcomer Tony Revolori and Ralph Fiennes sync their humor and performances like a pair of seasoned vaudevillian performers, with Fiennes playing the effusive Gustave H and Revolori as the young Zero, a classic straight man along for the ride.

Anderson and his brilliant cast of dozens (an embarrassment of talent that, happily, coalesces within the Director's vision) deftly walk the fine line of a convincing farce. In an increasingly self-aware, meta-world, Grand Budapest is a blast of fresh air, featuring hilariously self-involved prigs tied to a devoted sense of manners dashing through a mad caper to win the riches and fabulous prizes of a sadly departed rich old woman. The actors in Grand Budapest hurl lines like that last sentence liberally and breathlessly at one another throughout the film.  

 
Grand Budapest Hotel will be a film that will age well because it is rooted in classic cinematic elements with historical hooks. In a year of deep, dark, serious and often violent films, Grand Budapest reminds us it's not just okay but splendid gift to be wild, whimsical and funny. 

Resonance Rating: 4.5 out of 5