The cinema of Wes Anderson is nothing if not mechanical. Watching his movies is less like marvelling at the silent workings of a Swiss watch than goggling at the innards of a grandfather clock, cogs and pulleys proudly displayed. Theatrical framing devices are everywhere, from book bindings to doll's houses to miniature stages and fluctuating screen ratios, with chapter headings a recurrent feature. As for the performances, one imagines that if Anderson were ever to include a "gag reel" of outtakes from his movies, it would include shots of an actor raising an eyebrow a millimetre too high, or placing a teacup an inch to the left of its allotted space upon a table.
Such choreographed precision and overwrought artifice can make Anderson's movies seem emotionally sterile – the all-too-arch constructions of a "smart cinema" icon whose idea of casual dress is (non?)-ironic corduroy. Yet rigorous physicality is also the key to screen comedy, following a tradition that dates back to the silent era and the carefully constructed pratfalls of Chaplin and Keaton. Significant, then, that The Grand Budapest Hotel is both Anderson's most tightly wound and funniest film in years, lacking the melancholy charm of The Royal Tenenbaums or Moonrise Kingdom perhaps, but more than making up for it in terms of elegantly capering contrivance.
The action centres upon the titular establishment, a once-grand confection of a building located in the imaginary European state of Zubrowka, lurking somewhere between the Best Exotic Marigold and the Overlook hotels, with Anderson's prowling, panning cameras occasionally resembling a cartoon caricature of Kubrick on speed. As ever, the story unfolds as a series of boxes within boxes. Our first narrator, a writer (variously played by Tom Wilkinson and Jude Law) hands the baton to a second storyteller, Mr Moustafa (F Murray Abraham, embodied in younger years by Tony Revolori) who in turn draws our attention to the real heart of the matter: the charismatic concierge, M Gustave (a splendidly rancid and randy Ralph Fiennes). Back in the 30s, Gustave was the hotel's primary attraction, a vision of purple-clad slickness attending the guests with oily efficiency, bedding the dowagers whose patronage was his fetish. When one such dowager (an unrecognisable Tilda Swinton) expires, leaving Gustave a priceless painting, the family revolts, and a frenetic caper is set in motion involving art theft, murder, love, prison breaks, steam trains, cable cars, occupying armies (non-specific war breaks out), dead cats, a clandestine order of fraternal concierges and elaborate cakes. In boxes.
With Lubitsch and Hitchcock his guiding lights, and author Stefan Zweig providing inspiration for a screenplay co-written with Hugo Guinness, Anderson conjures a fictional vision of Europe that nods its head towards the Hollywood backlots upon which so many émigré directors worked their magic in the golden age of the studios. Everything looks like a set, and deliberately so, with the screen oscillating between classic Academy ratio and more panoramic widescreen (both 1.85 and 2.35) to differentiate between the various time periods, ancient and modern(ish).
The overriding air is one of carefully controlled craziness in which even the outbursts of sporadic violence (a spontaneous gunfight shatters the hotel's studied serenity) are politely staged. It's a rigid structure in which the players flourish, most notably Fiennes, who caught Anderson's eye in a stage production of the savage farce God of Carnage, and whose brittle manner here proves the director's perfect tool. Relishing rapid-fire dialogue that veers incongruously between the oleaginous and the obscene (his clipped diction lends bizarre gravitas to the phrase "shaking like a shitting dog"), Fiennes is in roaring form, his timing note-perfect down to the last demisemiquaver, his mannerisms piercingly angular, from the set of his arms to the arch of his back, the curl of his lip, the bristle of his manicured moustache. Even more so than the mannequins of Fantastic Mr Fox, Fiennes has the appearance of an expertly animated creation, painstakingly captured frame by frame, each gesture rich in detail.
Around him a rogues' gallery of regular players is augmented by a growing gaggle of the great and the good, with fleeting turns from Bill Murray and Owen Wilson fighting for space alongside Harvey Keitel's shaven-headed comrade-in-crime, Saoirse Ronan's perfect partner, Adrien Brody's conniving son, Willem Dafoe's feral thug, Léa Seydoux's inquisitive maid, Mathieu Amalric's elusive butler, Jeff Goldblum's Freud-like lawyer, Jason Schwartzman's third-rate concierge, and more.
Sometimes the level of fleeting celebrity spectacle threatens distraction, with too many guests for even this sprawling hotel to accommodate. Yet each time we return to Abraham's ageing narrator the story coalesces once more, allowing the deeper undercurrents of personal loss and historical tragedy to breathe, albeit briefly.
With its signature zooms, satirical tableaux, and fiercely ordered visual palette (architecture is everything, from the hairstyles to the shot compositions) this is Anderson-world writ large: a hermetically sealed environment in which reality is something you only read about in books, and the upheavals of the interwar years provide tonal rather than political background. What slices the surface is the rapier-sharp wit, with Fiennes on point at all times, a dashing foil for his director's comedic cut and thrust.
