APPROACHING Wes Anderson’s mostly delightful The Grand Budapest Hotel can give you the foreboding you feel when encountering the word “artisanal.” It’s seriously under-femaled, and it pauses to congratulate itself for its cleverness. At worst, Anderson is a director of ducky films, but this nested story of Central European skullduggery seems to have more of a spine than anything he’s made since Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Anderson claims to have been influenced by the writer of Austrian decline, Stefan Zweig. I thought there was a different influence, though, by the Czech author Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England. It’s a tale told by the proprietor of a declining luxury hotel during the 1960s in the Slovenia-like nation of Zubrowka. F. Murray Abraham is the turtlenecked proprietor Moustafa, a man who looks as haunted as Solzhenitsyn. In a conversation over dinner, this elder tells a young writer (Jude Law) about the life Moustafa had between the wars. He was a lad (played by Tony Revolori) back when the carpets were a sumptuous imperial crimson and not a repulsive Intourist burnt-orange. In those days Moustafa was mentored by the suave concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes, terrifically louche), a heavily scented, indifferently heterosexual squire to wealthy elderly women. His oldest client (Tilda Swinton, grotesque in old-age makeup) bequeaths Gustave a valuable painting. Thus the upstart hotelier becomes involved with blueblooded fascists, including Adrien Brody, the Black Michael of this Zenda and his leather-wrapped thug Jopling (a snarling Willem Dafoe).
Jailbreaks, alpine assassination, harrowing castles and political discord make this an unusually ripsnorting Anderson film. Far more like him are his asides: mentions of a far-off land called “Dutch Tanganyika,” rides on the trams of the gloomy capital city, Lutz, and a visit to the Bureau of Labor and Servitude. It doesn’t seem to be all about the art direction. Anderson styles his productions American Empirical, and he finally seems to have a fully running studio: a script department, a tabletop special effects lab, a first-rate music department and a stable of actors, including an artistically disfigured Saoirse Ronan, Harvey Keitel as a bald convict and Jeff Goldblum, in spectacles that make him look like Sartre.
R; 99 min.
