The Grand Budapest Hotel movie review (2014)

The dialogue is contemporary American, with plenty of cursing; the action is often grisly slapstick, with an upping of the imperiled-animal quotient that provided one of the more disquieting scenes of Anderson's last feature, "Moonrise Kingdom." The references are multitudinous, and come from everywhere (one of my favorites is a cable car sequence nodding to Carol Reed's 1940 thriller "Night Train To Munich"). The cast is the usual top-to-bottom array of incredible talent, including, aside from the aforementioned, Matthew Amalric, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Harvey Keitel, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, Léa Seydoux, and Anderson stalwarts Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, and Owen Wilson. (Newcomer Tony Revolori plays the young Moustafa.) The settings include not just the hotel but also a dank prison, a heavenly bakeshop, and all manner of horse drawn or steam-driven conveyances.

Although it's packed with incident, there's a stillness to the film that makes looking at it feel as if you're staring at a zoetrope image of a snow globe, while at the same time a stray epithet here or the spectacle of some severed digits there pulls in a different direction, suggesting Anderson's conjured world is subject to tensions that exist entirely outside of it, calling attention to that which is unseen on the screen: an anxious creator who wants everything just so, but can't control the intrusion of vulgarity or cruelty. This tension is reflected in the character of M. Gustave himself, whose air of refinement masks a boyish exuberance and vulgarity, and who is nevertheless revealed at the movie's end to be a human being of absolute nobility.

As much as "The Grand Budapest Hotel" takes on the aspect of a cinematic confection, it does so to grapple with the very raw and, yes, real stuff of humanity from an unusual but highly illuminating angle. "The Grand Budapest Hotel" is a movie about the masks we conjure to suit our aspirations, and the cost of keeping up appearances. "He certainly maintained the illusion with remarkable grace," one character remarks admiringly of another near the end of the movie. "The Grand Budapest Hotel" suggests that sometimes, as a species, that's the best we can do. Anderson the illusion-maker is more than graceful, he's dazzling, and with this movie he's created an art-refuge that consoles and commiserates. It's an illusion, but it's not a lie.

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