Cinematic refuge, at your service

The film infolds in a comically elaborate nesting structure: the bulk of its story is told in flashback within flashback within flashback. It’s a way of making us conscious of how much memory and imagination have had their way with what we’re promised by the man known only as Author (Tom Wilkinson in one layer, Jude Law in another) is exacting in its fidelity to the true story. It’s also a way of emphasizing the distinctive balance between realism and artifice that Wes Anderson has been carefully cultivating over the last two decades. An elegy for a lost world that closely resembles but is not exactly our own—nostalgia for something that never was—The Grand Budapest Hotel might be the most perfect expression of that balance yet. 

Inspired by the work of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), much of the action is set in the 1930s, in the titular alpine hotel, itself nested in the fictional Zubrowka, a central European republic gradually sliding under the control of a thuggish foreign power à la Nazi Germany. Dark times loom, yet at the Grand Budapest all efforts are made to stall time, to maintain a rarified air. Its dandyish proprietor, M. Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), is especially devoted to his elderly wealthy female guests, whom he ensures are pampered in every way, including erotically, a duty he happily takes on himself. Over the course of the film Gustave will take the adolescent Middle Eastern refugee lobby boy Zero Moustafa (Tony Revolori) under his wing. The plot quickly thickens: one of Gustave’s cherished clients dies, leaving him an invaluable painting, stoking the ire of her ingrate sociopath son (Adrien Brody). Gustave is accused of murder, is actually guilty of theft, sort of, is imprisoned, breaks out of prison, goes on the lam and is forced to prove his innocence. All the while he and Zero become the closest of allies. “We’re brothers,” says Zero during a pivotal scene, echoing a key themes of nearly every Anderson movie. 

Colour-coordinated pageantry, over-abundant signage and streaming lateral movement through constructed sets in real places provide constant pleasure. The film is a stunning gallery of moustaches, from Zero’s penciled-on to what looks like a charcoal-drawn medieval gate framing Jeff Goldblum’s lovely mouth. The tone is madcap, mannered, an irreverent ode to effeminate men and sexual ambivalence, always rushing along at silent comedy speed, a hurried walk propelled by anxiety and terror yet tempered by a hilariously scrupulous formality. The low-affect performances from a cast teeming with beloved actors, many of them Anderson vets (Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham, Edward Norton and Harvey Keitel, to name a few), are uniformly sublime, Fiennes most of all. (Why does this guy not do more comedy?) 

The Grand Budapest Hotel keeps us aware always of the brutality and doom blackening its margins by working strenuously to downplay it—an approach more poignant than any direct or ostentatiously emotive alternative. A destination in its own right, as opposed an upscale crash-pad, the hotel is a refuge, a place where the linens are always crisp and the flowers fresh. Everything in this film is a form of refuge from hardship, conflict, loneliness: a lovingly sculpted pastry, a thoughtfully arranged room, a beautifully designed ski-chase sequence, a job well-executed and acknowledged as such, a proscenium that encases all the action, behaviour and opulence and never falls away. The elegant handmade craftsmanship of Anderson and his collaborators is here, at your service, in even the darkest hours. 

             

Days when every shrub poses a threat

A man alone in a room, waiting in the gloom, unnervingly still, watching the clock on the wall. On the wall behind the man, the man’s shadow hovers close, doubling him, looming, succubus-like, ready to follow the man when, once the clock strikes six, he rises from that chair and leaves Lembridge Asylum.

What story shall we tell? One of the truly delicious things about the opening moments of Ministry of Fear (1944) is that it’s so saturated with forbidding mood and transfixing ambiguity that it seems it could go anywhere, could become any number of stories. The story that it does become, one of geopolitical intrigue, deadly pursuit, paranoia, betrayal, mystery pastry, and guilt, is dizzyingly dense with plot—and with plots—and, to my eyes and ears, a deeply satisfying, dream-like suspense film. Certain elements are very much of the time, with Nazis aplenty, yet the film feels out of time, of any time—its eeriness is timeless. Oddly enough, you get the impression that this timelessness, this careful drawing upon anxiogenic symbols from the collective unconscious, is precisely what Graham Greene, whose novel provided the film with its source material, didn’t like. And he claimed that Fritz Lang, the film’s director, didn’t like it either. Perhaps because, at that time, it seemed so important to make Ministry of Fear, like Lang’s Man Hunt (1941) and Hangmen Also Die (1943), an explicitly anti-Nazi picture—Lang was a self-exiled German—and the film’s Nazis simply weren’t Nazi enough: no secret chambers adorned with swastika flags or giant portraits of the Führer, no maniacal speeches about world domination. Fair enough, I suppose. But what we have in the place of a rallying cry for the Allies is a wildly evocative, exquisitely designed, utterly entertaining nightmare. The film is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Criterion.

That man in the room is Stephen Neale. One of the first people he encounters is a fortune-teller, who seems to be waiting for him. She wants to talk about the women in his past, something that makes him very uncomfortable—Neale did time in Lembridge after being found guilty of “mercy killing” his ailing wife. Neale’s played by Ray Milland, one of those rare stars who could easily be the hero or the heavy, whose every gesture is perfectly gauged so as to draw us in and alternately earn our sympathies and prompt us to question his reliability. Against the advice of his doctor, Neale opts to head straight to London upon release. A bustling city, and a place upon which bombs could fall at any moment—talk about ominous. Everything in Ministry of Fear is ominous, from the weird din of boisterous laughter that Neale finds in certain crowds to the séance in which the medium speaks directly to him, from the perpetual fog to the sculpted shrubbery to the ladies large-brimmed translucent hats. Lang, as responsible for ushering German expressionism into Hollywood cinema as anyone, accents the unease by keeping the characters most often in the middle distance (that trademark dearth of point-of-view), and by not relying on the musical score in key moments of tension. So many of the film’s scenes are so compellingly strange: a blind man cane-tapping his way through a curtain of steam; two grown men eating cake without plates or cutlery on a train; a carpet of Englishmen sleeping on the floor of a tube station bomb shelter; a tailor (Dan Duryea) dialing a telephone with a giant pair of scissors. Every moment promises something new, some development that might change the course of everything. It’s almost surreal. But haven’t you had days like this?