The Grand Budapest Hotel

This is one of the few films we've shown this year that I actually saw in advance of our screening.  I'd missed it at the cinema and caught up with it on DVD - but it definitely repaid a second look, especially on our big(gish) screen.

Here are my notes:

The Grand Budapest Hotel

USA 2014                    100 minutes

Director:                      Wes Anderson

Starring:                        Ralph Fiennes, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe and Tony Revolori

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Film, Director and Original Screenplay, and won four Oscars
• Won BAFTAs for Best Original Screenplay, Best Soundtrack, Costumes and Production Design and nominated for six more including Best Film, Director, Leading Actor (Ralph Fiennes), Best Supporting Actor and Original Screenplay
• A further 95 wins and 110 nominations

“In some hands, this convoluted, labyrinthine narrative would end up a sprawling mess, but such is Anderson's storytelling discipline – informed and sustained by the precision of the cinematography and set design – that it never gets away from him. As Gustave skips from hotel lobby to prison camp, from railway carriage to drawing room, the architecture of this picaresque remains entirely lucid."

Andrew Pulver

 In its 1930s glory days the Grand Budapest Hotel, located in the Central European Republic of Zubrowka, is presided over by Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), the hotel’s devoted concierge.  Among his many other duties Gustave H. courts a series of elderly women, including Madame D (an almost unrecognisable Tilda Swinton), who flock to the hotel to enjoy his “exceptional service”.  Following the death of Madame D. Gustave H. attends her funeral: he suspects that she has been murdered and learns that she has bequeathed him a valuable painting in her will, but her family want it and her son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) will stop at nothing to get it back.

Wes Anderson wrote the screenplay from an original story he had co-written, but it was inspired by the writings of Stefan Zweig, an Austrian novelist, playwright and journalist.  In the 1920s and 1930s Zweig was one of the most popular writers in the world but now he is best known for his novel Letter from an Unknown Woman, filmed in Hollywood by Max Ophuls in 1948.  Anderson’s inspiration for his story was Zweig’s 1927 novella Twenty Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (filmed in 1952 and remade twice since) as well as his 1939 novel Beware of Pity, filmed in Britain in 1946.

 

The film had its premier at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival where Wes Anderson received the Grand Jury Prize.  On it general release the film received excellent reviews with many critics commenting particularly on the performance of Ralph Fiennes (in a role written originally written for Johnny Depp) as Gustave H.  In a recent profile of Fiennes Anne Billson reviewed his film career to date and with regard to The Grand Budapest Hotel commented:

 

“His Gustave H., in Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, is probably the most likeable character he has ever played.  Amid the film's colourful assembly of caricatures, his fey but ferociously efficient concierge is full of regretful nuance, provides the film with its moral backbone, and heartbreakingly embodies the values of a lost epoch. It's a lovely performance.”