Consider this your official thread for Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel. What are your favorite moments, themes, and compositions? How do you think this film relates to the rest of Anderson's filmography? Discuss!
I really like this one. I think M. Gustave is my favorite Wes Anderson character ever. Ralph Fiennes is just perfect in the role. The whole cast is impressive, though.
I think one of the key lines of the movie is one of the last one's delivered by Zero to Author: "To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it. But I will say, he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace."
It feels like we are viewing the whole world through M. Gustave's rose-colored glasses. It's romanticized, charming, sophisticated, fun. And it's all an illusion. But as the movie progresses we are start to see the harshness of reality creep in. You get it with the cat being murdered and the disbelief on Jeff Goldblum's face. You get it with his own fingers being severed, after a fun cat and mouse chase. You get the severed head.
Prison doesn't seem all that bad and you get a fun escape, culminating in a bloody fight between guards and an inmate that shocks the audience and M. Gustave. Then there is the moment where Zero shocks Gustave with his backstory and how he became a refugee, forcing Gustave to reevaluate his assumptions. And then in Gustave's final scene all the vibrant color is drained away and the affable Edward Norton is nowhere to be found and reality catches up with Gustave.
I also love the aspect ratio changes. When we are back in the 1930's it's the old Hollywood aspect ratio and it feels like classic Hollywood, which was all a big fantasy.
Not only does that last Zero line about illusion relate to the movie itself and how it unfolds, but I also think it relates to Wes Anderson himself. His world and the types of movies he wants to make vanished long before he entered the world and started making movies.
I didn't rewatch before the podcast, but I thought the more recent 1960s Grand Budapest hotel where Jude Law goes to get Zero's story is supposed to be the grey Communist Brutalist/Modernism that replaces the grace and joie de vivre that existed in the inter-war period.
Stuff like this hotel in Moscow , now gone
Actually I was googling for images and found this Wes Anderson interview where he talks about putting the communism into the Grand Budapest Hotel:
Comments
We had the hotel of the ‘30s, and it needed an identity. We’d seen this pink hotel in Karlovy Vary—which used to be Carlsbad—in the Czech Republic, and it’s an old spa town. We went there, and when you go to these places, they’re ruined but there are lots of images of what it used to be like. Our design for the movie was the hotel when it was at its peak, and I just thought we’d make it look like a wedding cake or ice cream parlor with these pastel purple, pink, and red colors. It’s the anti-Overlook Hotel. And then in the ‘60s, it’s more like the Overlook Hotel, and then we make it communist. The look of that period comes from a hotel in Budapest called the Gellért, and during the communist period they installed panels and layers to it."