Wes Anderson makes films that aren't like the films of anyone else. That
may or may not be a good thing, depending on whether you 'get' them.
I've always felt his films were like live action versions of the
cartoons in 'The New Yorker'; sometimes they're funny, most of the time
they're clever and always they seem to be designed for the
intelligentsia. Perhaps that's why Wes Anderson's films don't make lots
of money or win Oscars. Even the 'intellectual' New York comedies of
Woody Allen have a wider appeal, not that their films have a great deal
in common except, perhaps, their 'smartness'.
Although "The Grand
Budapest Hotel" has secured a multiplex release I doubt if it will wow
them in Des Moines which is a pity since this is a film of considerable
charm and a good deal of wit. OK, it's hardly laugh-out-loud funny but I
had a silly grin on my face from start to finish. Like all his films
it's set in what we might call 'Andersonland', a totally fabricated
country made up of scraps from his favourite fiction, in this case the
writings of Stefan Zweig who gets a special dedication at the end. It's
literary in that words matter a great deal and play an important part in
the development of the story and it's a film in which stories are
crucial, (it's divided, like a novel, into chapters).
Indeed, the
story that makes up the body of the film is told as a story within a
story begun by elderly author Tom Wilkinson informing us of how he first
met the owner of the The Grand Budapest Hotel many years before when we
was a young writer, (played by Jude Law), and the owner was an old man,
(an excellent F Murray Abraham), who in turn tells the story of when he
was a mere lobby boy, (newcomer Tony Revolori), under the tutelage of
the hotel's concierge and the films central character, M Gustave, (a
superb comic performance from Ralph Fiennes). It's when we get back to
this point in time that the dimensions of the screen change from today's
customary widescreen to the box-like dimensions of '30's cinema. It's
as if Anderson is paying tribute, not just to writers like Zweig, but to
film-makers like Ernst Lubitsch as this is a Ruritanian romance set in
the kind of Mitteleuropa so beloved of Lubitsch and others of the
period. All it lacks are the characters periodically bursting into song.
If the film doesn't quite live up to its predecessors such as "The
Royal Tenenbaums" or "The Life Aquatic" I think it's because there's no
emotional commitment to the characters, It's too skittish, too
self-consciously smart to draw us in. On the other hand it looks
amazing. The hotel itself is like a giant cake that the baker in the
film, M Mendl, might have made, and then there's always that
extraordinary cast to keep us entertained. The film reads like a Who's
Who, not just of Anderson regulars, but of moviedom's best character
actors. None of them are, of course, remotely 'realistic', not even
Fiennes. They remain the stock characters we find in those 'New Yorker'
cartoons but they remain good company nevertheless. One thing is
guaranteed, of course; you won't find anything else like it, at least
not until Anderson makes his next movie.
The films reviewed here represent those I have liked or loved over the years. It is not a list of my favourite films but all the films reviewed here are worth seeing and worth seeking out. I know many of you won't agree with me on a lot of these but hopefully you will grant me, and the films that appear here, our place in the sun. Thanks for reading.
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