The Grand Budapest Hotel

MOVIE #1,250 •🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿• 11.23.23 WES ANDERSON: DIRECTOR FOCUS The next two films in this reverse chronological Director Focus on Wes Anderson — this and Moonrise Kingdom — I've always seen as a pair for some reason. I haven't viewed either in a while and, though I generally recall liking them, they didn't connect with me like his earlier work. So I was very interested to see how they stack up now. The films came out just two years apart and clearly mark one of the most fertile periods in Anderson’s career, so I decided to watch them back to back. I mulled over writing a single review for both, but I think I’ll save my thoughts on Moonrise, which is clearly the lesser of the two, for next week. This movie is a delight. Just scene after perfect scene of some of the most creative filmmaking you'll ever see.

I have no qualms with someone labeling this Anderson's best ever. One of Anderson's most interesting tropes is crafting leads who are incredibly flawed, the zenith of which is likely Gene Hackman as Royal Tenenbaum, though Ralph Fiennes as Monsieur Gustave H. is giving him a run for the money. It’s such a lovely, layered performance, one that might have gotten lost in the artifice of the aesthetics if Fiennes wasn’t so thrilling and engaged.

I think my feeling that his films got more visually opulent and less emotionally resonant as they went along is still correct, but this one had way more heart than I remembered. I loved it. I love Wes Anderson and this one — somewhat to my surprise — ranks among his very best.

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The Grand Budapest Hotel is a 2014 comedy-drama film written and directed by Wes Anderson. Ralph Fiennes leads a seventeen-actor ensemble cast as Monsieur Gustave H., famed concierge of a twentieth-century mountainside resort in the fictional Eastern European country of Zubrowka. When Gustave is framed for the murder of a wealthy dowager (Tilda Swinton), he and his recently befriended protégé Zero (Tony Revolori) embark on a quest for fortune and a priceless Renaissance painting amidst the backdrop of an encroaching fascist regime. Anderson's American Empirical Pictures produced the film in association with Studio Babelsberg, Fox Searchlight Pictures, and Indian Paintbrush's Scott Rudin and Steven Rales. Fox Searchlight supervised the commercial distribution, and The Grand Budapest Hotel's funding was sourced through Indian Paintbrush and German government-funded tax rebates. It was released on February 6, 2014.