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But he certainly sustained the illusion with a remarkable grace
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) is a confection, but a curiously elegiac one. Nested within three frames of time like an especially complex mille-feuille (the pastry metaphors are impossible to avoid; there's a plot point with macarons), the story builds an extraordinary depth of remembrance around a main plot so elaborately zany, it enjoys a murder mystery, a prison break, and the trade secrets of the hotel business while still finding time for a funicular, a romance, some truly awful shag carpet, more than one chase scene, balalaikas, and the outbreak of World War II. There's a man blamed for murder right out of Hitchcock, but he did steal the pricelessly famous painting and he knows its value on the black market, too. There's more than one MacGuffin. The ideal soundbite for this film is "the Lubitsch touch with a lot more people saying 'fuck'." Wes Anderson isn't Ernst Lubitsch, of course, nor is he even Mel Brooks, but I didn't expect him even to contemplate addressing the historical shadows which fall just out of frame of the Republic of Zubrowska in 1932, the Grand Budapest Hotel itself perched like a pristine cake topper on a diagonal of mountains so painstakingly detailed, they can't be anything but models and mattes. It's all brightly colored and meticulously poised and centrally framed and sideways-tracked and scene slots neatly into scene as efficiently as the staff of the hotel in their daily procession and yet none of it is insubstantial; it is the always lost, always nostalgic past of elegance and civility and decadence and discretion and we know exactly when it came to a very sharp stop, because Zubrowska is subject to the same historical trends as its Mitteleuropean neighbors, Orsinia, Bandrika, and we remember what was happening there in the '30's, don't we. We meet the hotel for the first time in 1968, all Soviet-bloc slap-over of its Fabergé balconies and gilded elevator cages. Watching the movie flirt through genres with all its airy social slapstick and madcap anachronism is the process of—not recovering, because it's not coming back, but realizing what once was. The film knows there are some realities that no amount of retelling can make over into a great escape or a grand affair, black-and-white and fixed as newsreel footage. It knows also that some things are never gone out of the world so long as someone knows their story. We're told this point-blank, by the very structure at the start; it still manages to sneak up on the viewer somehow. And in between there is a lot of very funny dialogue, some surprising gore, and a performance I'm sorry Ralph Fiennes won't win anything for, because it is perfectly, heartfeltly artificial in a way that mostly went out with the Golden Age of Hollywood. There is nothing realistic about M. Gustave, but you recognize him instantly. There's some Powell and Pressburger in this movie, too—the historical look-back of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), the feverish projections of Black Narcissus (1947). Anton Walbrook wouldn't have played the concierge with his fastidious perfume and explosive profanity, but I have no doubt Gustave could have gotten front-row tickets to the Ballet Lermontov on the night.
(Some time after coming home, I realized that the film also reminded me of the children's opera Brundibár, which I saw at Yale in aaaagh 2006; I am still trying to parse quite why. I think it might be something about Adrian Brody's Dmitri Desgoffe-und-Taxis in his black leather greatcoat and his moustache which he might as well have been twirling, confronting Gustave with high-school jock trash-talk and smashing a terrifically lesbian piece of degenerate art (if it's not Schiele, it's a great pastiche). He's not a stand-in—he can't be—but he recalls. There are two kinds of danger in this film: the kind that can be fooled and dodged, and history. I wasn't expecting the latter.)
That's two Wes Andersons in a row I've really, really liked. Maybe he's evolving.
(Some time after coming home, I realized that the film also reminded me of the children's opera Brundibár, which I saw at Yale in aaaagh 2006; I am still trying to parse quite why. I think it might be something about Adrian Brody's Dmitri Desgoffe-und-Taxis in his black leather greatcoat and his moustache which he might as well have been twirling, confronting Gustave with high-school jock trash-talk and smashing a terrifically lesbian piece of degenerate art (if it's not Schiele, it's a great pastiche). He's not a stand-in—he can't be—but he recalls. There are two kinds of danger in this film: the kind that can be fooled and dodged, and history. I wasn't expecting the latter.)
That's two Wes Andersons in a row I've really, really liked. Maybe he's evolving.
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The mustaches do, too. Also the parting of Ralph Fiennes' hair, which I know is not a special effect only because at key points it becomes disarranged. I might have suspected motion-cap otherwise.
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Those historical shadows just out of frame, perhaps? Brundibár is probably the textbook example after all.
Grand Budapest Hotel sounds a little as though it takes place in the same universe as The Imposters, but at a less-safe distance.
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What is it with macarons? As the ninja girl observed, suddenly they're everywhere. Everywhere. (Everywhere = on the cover of magazines at the supermarket checkout, on Tumblr, and in Sovay's blog.)
I had never heard of them or seen one before, oh, two weeks ago.
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I am afraid that was The Monuments Men, which was a fine solid old-fashioned movie in the style of '50's and '60's war films, but nowhere near as complex. The Grand Budapest Hotel is much funnier, more metafictional, and more unexpectedly poignant. I am less in love with it than I was with Moonrise Kingdom because The Grand Budapest Hotel is less interested in its characters being real people—I don't say that as a failing; it's a conscious choice and one of the things I may talk about in comments, if I can get enough time tonight—and Moonrise Kingdom is a tighter, more resonant film overall, but I really, really like it and I didn't expect half the things it turned out to be about. You may need to brace yourself for a couple of grisly moments (it's a film with both real and cartoon violence, occasionally both at the same time), but I think you would find it well worth your time.
I had never heard of them or seen one before, oh, two weeks ago.
I've been eating them at Burdick's since 2006. They call them Luxembourgers, but it's the same pastry. I do agree they're booming lately and I'm not sure why, but I don't object. I like meringue and I like buttercream and I like an assortment of flavors.
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It was performed in Boston in early 2011 and I couldn't make it! I am still sorry about that.
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I am very fond of Bottle Rocket (1996), his first feature: it's a small, sharp, and affectionate study of two friends and their getaway driver, plus a low-key romance that I believe. It's much less formal than his later work, although it already knows how to stage a set-piece, and very funny in ways that aren't as broad as tragicomedy. I don't want to say very much about the plot, because one of the lovely things about the film is the way it looks like it's going nowhere, or somewhere, and doesn't, or does, without ever baiting the audience: it's not about reversing expectations. It was my introduction to Luke and Owen Wilson and possibly still the role in which I like the latter best.
Moonrise Kingdom (2012) I love beyond measure. I didn't expect to. It is a beautiful, perfect YA novel from the year in which it takes place—1965—but everyone in it is real, its twelve-year-old protagonists most especially. Sam and Suzy are smart, isolated, unorthodox kids and they decide to run away from civilization together in the time-honored fashion, one of them packing the utmost in survival gear available to a Boy Scout on a summer retreat, the other bringing her six favorite books, her cat, the pair of binoculars which goes everywhere with her, and the record player that technically belongs to her brother. They are pursued in exactly the same fashion, by police and parents and worried surrogate figures, as almost never happens in real life and everyone knows from fiction. It's tempting to categorize some of the plot as magical realism, but in a children's book that's just the way the outside world reflects a character's inner life. Supporting characters are drawn in the same mode: Edward Norton's Scoutmaster Ward is exactly the sort of slightly sad, earnest adult that YA novels feel sympathy for, as opposed to the stiff figures of authority like Tilda Swinton's Social Services whom everyone knows are to be hidden from, hoodwinked, and faced down, but almost no one is a cartoon. (The film makes an exception for Commander Pierce of the Khaki Scouts, but let's face it: if he were real, he'd still be like that.) And the music is woven beautifully throughout, with additional resonance if you recognize the original contexts—Noye's Fludde is the really obvious one, but what's playing during Sam and Suzy's idyll in the cove they name "Moonrise Kingdom" is "On the ground, sleep sound" from Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Also, much of the fictitious New England island of New Penzance was filmed on locations I recognize, Conanicut Island in particular. Moonrise Kingdom is a beach where Caitlín has taken me to gather sea-glass. I recognized it from the first long shot. That was a surprise and only endears the film to me more.
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I think the chances are very good that you'll enjoy if for no other reason than Ralph Fiennes, but the rest of the film has a decent shot at pleasing you, too.