Directed by: Wes Anderson
Rating: ★½
While The Grand Budapest Hotel may boast an impressive ensemble cast, what it has in big names it lacks in comedy and coherence.
The movie tries it’s very hardest to be oh-so witty and oh-so intelligent, but only very pretentious movie critics will love this film because they ‘get it’: any normal person with their brain not set on ‘pompous’ will find it hard to enjoy.
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| The Grand Budapest Hotel: a place where famous actors go to destroy their reputation. |
The Grand Budapest Hotel proves its ostentation in the opening minutes, when the audience will discover in horror that they are about to watch a story within a story within a story within a story. But darling that’s oh-so clever because it’s playing around with narrative construction, or something, so all of the people who once did a course on narrative theory understand how ‘different’ and ‘clever’ it is being, when in fact it’s just plain unnecessary and confusing.
Inception this is most definitely not.
Once we actually get to the main plot, within the three others, we discover that the protagonist Gustave (Fiennes) is an English gentleman who likes to woo geriatric ladies and say the f-word.
So if you think that idea of a posh English man having sex with old women and swearing mercilessly is funny, then you’ll love this movie.
I didn’t. In fact, I don’t understand why anyone would. But clearly I’m in the minority, because plenty of people seemed to think that a two dimensional character from a 1970s sketch show is good enough to drive a nonsensical plot forward.
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| No one is laughing, Adrian. No one. |
The film is set in a fictional European country for no real reason, and takes place just before and during the Second World War, also for no real reason accept to have very minor references to Nazi Germany which are in no way important to the actual story.
It’s pointless for me to describe the plot, mainly because it is seven different genre movies all wrapped into one: murder mystery, prison movie, art heist, love story, screwball comedy, investigative thriller and even, rather oddly, a horror.
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| Zero falls for Agatha (Ronan) to wrap up so jarring plot elements and to add another genre into the movie's mix... |
But the top and tail of it is that The Grand Budapest Hotel is a buddy movie that is all about a stolen painting, missing will and the protagonists Gustave and Zero (Revolori) being chased by an assassin.
The ‘comedy’ elements are in the frequent appearance of celebrity cameos, a really fake looking alpine chase, a cat being thrown out a window, a man having his fingers chopped off and someone being decapitated.
I wasn’t laughing.
Fiennes minces around the movie giving his all to a strange and completely muddled script. He is dominating as Gustave, but ultimately his character is very annoying and strangely unlikeable. Everyone else in the film is just a vessel for Fiennes to interact with, and although many actors try to send themselves up in off-beat roles, they just can’t compete against the central powerhouse of TheRalph Fiennes Movie.
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| Oh Ralph- I've now seen enough of your gurning to last a lifetime! (And I never want to see it again) |
I think I would have liked The Grand Budapest Hotel if it had been made for children, because it has a very goofy and over the top plot with insane character and zany events- but takes itself so seriously that you can’t actually enjoy it. The whole thing looks and feels like a cartoon, so if the swearing, violence and pretention had been non-existent then the film would have been a lot stronger as both kids and adults would have loved it.
Director Wes Anderson, who also wrote the film, proves he has gone made with power as he chose to make every shot look horrible, just because he can. The squashed frames, symmetrical shots and nightmarish psychedelic colours add nothing to the movie, and fail to suit the style or tone of it. He just did it because he thinks he’s an auteur or something, but him showing off his ‘technical understanding’ of moviemaking just makes him look incompetent and proves that he doesn’t actually know what he’s doing.
The Grand Budapest Hotel is as pretentious and flawed as Hugo, but isn’t quite as bad because there are at least some good bits in it, even though they are very few and far between. Parts of it are entertaining, mainly the sequence set in the mountains, but only if you switch your brain off to the over exaggerated dialogue and incredibly bombastic plot.
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