This is a great movie. It’s almost as if Wes Anderson, knowing we expect him to give us kitsch, cute, and darkly funny has decided to take Chekhov’s maxim that art should “prepare us for tenderness” to heart. The movie starts off with a girl in the modern day (presumably) walking up to a statue of an author in a park in the fictional Eastern European country of Zubrowka, sitting beside it and beginning to read one of his books. We then hear the author narrating, while sitting in his study, telling us of his visit to the Grand Budapest Hotel. We are taken to the Grand Budapest Hotel, where the author, now much younger, is staying for a season. While there he meets the owner of the hotel, Zero Mustafa, who tells us of his humble beginnings as a lobby boy. Then we can take a breath, because this is where the real story begins.
The story progresses with all the kitschy mise-en-scene, dollhouse-like sets, and careful fairytale framing that we would expect from Wes Anderson, but hints of something deeper are already apparent. The relationship between the young Zero and the concierge is moving, and both of them are fully realized human characters. The encounter between them and the forces invading Zubrowka is the first hint that the movie is aiming for something deeper. The story is exciting, stylish, and moving, but The Grand Budapest Hotel is as much about the framing as about the story in the middle. The story happens in the almost-unmentioned midst of an alt-Nazi invasion of Zubrowka, and the tension between the rarefied, effete world of the wealthy and sophisticated and the incoming storm of war is powerful wherever it is apparent.
The movie is absurd, but perhaps it is through an absurd alternate history that we can see history most truly. Books, classes, monuments, ruins, and common knowledge hide something about war and history. They hide its absurdity. The only thing making the invading forces in the movie more absurd than the forces that ravaged Europe half a century ago in our world is that we are used to our history. We have accepted it as part of the world, and only those who have been in it, those who were part of it can really understand the randomness of what happened.
Anyway, the other framing device is one that we forget about until the end of the movie, when the perspective switches back to the hotel, to the study, to the girl reading in the park. The story has always been set in the modern day, and we have been travelling through memory and literature into the past. We emerge blinking at the end, and the heartbreaking power of the movie seems revealed all at once. Their history, our history, and the great tragedy and power of the past.
The movie is about other things, too, of course. It deals powerfully with love, friendship and loneliness, but the history is what stuck with me the most. And aside from that pretentious stuff, it’s still a gorgeous, exciting, incredibly funny movie. The movie’s humor and excitement would form a fantastic movie by themselves. Even if that’s all you’re looking for, it succeeds in making the movie. If not, however, it all serves doubly to prepare us for tenderness.
