Ross Freedman says: Wes Andersons THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL is nothing if not a virtuoso piece of authentically modern cinema from an idiosyncratic auteur with a hand that has developed in assurance over a decades time. Every frame of this cinematic tinkertoy is so assiduously conceived and designed that for much of its length it plays less as a film than a pretext for a shot-by-shot Blu-ray analysis or coffee-table book appreciation. Like Hitchcock or Kubrick, Anderson is an uber control-freak and once the chord is pulled the movie moves by its own fast-paced clockwork logic without a hitch or glitch. And heres where I run into my problems with Anderson, like most of the rest of his oeuvre, THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL is a marvel to the eye but icy to the heart. Hence, my admiration is there but not quite a full emotional or intellectual embrace. Actually, Andersons narrative and visual facility are so impressive that slices of the picture suggest as J. Hoberman said of Kubrick, that he could be a true engineer of the soul if he ever believed in one. The wintry sights of a forlorn Germany, shot on location, are powerful with mood while a quickly cut trailing by one person of another in a dark museum on the outskirts of nowhere suggest Hitchcock if played at a slower tempo. Andersons alienation effects are more sophisticated and his references are more erudite and historically knowing than Quentin Tarantino, but, like him, he can be faulted for drowning in a cinematic hall-of-mirrors allegory while ignoring the gravity of history. Among the distancing techniques are the usual storybook layout, characters talking directly into the screen, an alternating screen ratio, a narrative twice removed and encased in a flashback, and cameos of aging character actors giving purposefully bad, American-accented line readings. Ralph Fiennes anchors it all with a comic grace, and, along with the narrator F. Murray Abraham, one of the only real performances in the movie. THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL is played as satire and black comedy, and like Kubrick, Anderson revels in the grotesque. The film has a disturbing undercurrent of grim death and kabuki-pancake ugliness. The comedy is so curdled that Im a little surprised at its box-office success. A smashing chase on skis, a la ON HER MAJESTYS SECRET SERVICE may be the secret ingredient. Hence, though I had a genial grin on my face for much of the movie I only laughed out loud only once, at a Tex Avery-ish gag, as Ralph Fiennes lobby boy knocks on a huge prison gate the size of the one on Kongs island, after which the camera nudges left to show a guard waving the man in from a small, regular-size door. Its here that Andersons storyboard perfection becomes self-defeating. The film is amusing without being funny. A little looseness and some breathing space for the behavioralism of his actors to flourish might have produced some vintage Blake Edwardian-style slapstick, or a chance to make a comic line resonate by slowing down for timing. The film has a melancholy narrative that would be a true heartbreaker if played straight. While Wes Andersons restrained, ironic touch is a tonic for a modern Hollywood film in avoiding the traps of melodrama and character identification, the indifference to the tally of deaths and the sad passage of time suggests, like Tarantino whom I mentioned earlier, a calculating sensibility that knows all about movies but nothing about life. Nonetheless, THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL is a genuinely personal and uncompromised artistic creation and I have no doubt it will be remembered and watched in the future while the clutter of films surrounding it will be forgotten tomorrow.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Apr 2014 23:46:21 +0000
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