By examining deeper issues in cute packaging, 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' is Anderson's best

cinema scope: Remember Hoffman’s talent rather than his tragic death

In 2000’s “Almost Famous,” Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing the rock critic Lester Bangs, says, “the only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you are uncool.”
I’ve thought about that line a lot over the years. It was the first thing I thought about last Sunday morning when the news of Hoffman’s untimely death reached my woebegone ears. When I was a camp counselor for four summers, I used to repeat that quote to my campers, 14-year olds entering high school, and we’d talk about the ways it rang true—what it meant to be cool in a world filled with rejection and judgment.
The above line comes at the end of “Almost Famous,” when a young rock journalist—the night before the deadline of his first major Rolling Stone article—calls his mentor and asks for advice. To be fair, they are writer-director Cameron Crowe’s words, but as he did in every single role, Philip Seymour Hoffman made them come alive.

cinema scope

By examining deeper issues in cute packaging, 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' is Anderson's best

April 1, 2014

Wes Anderson is an enigma. No other American filmmaker today is so equally praised and lambasted—his pictures are ravenously entertaining, but a tad too twee. There are too many visual flourishes and too thinly sketched characters.

Yet Anderson continues to evolve with each new picture. His last and perhaps most universally beloved film, “Moonrise Kingdom” (2012), packed a great many of his visual tricks (slow-motion tracking shots set to triumphant music, bilateral symmetry—where the characters seemed framed onscreen as if in a pop-up book) but it also revealed a big, heavy beating heart that centered around a touching story of young love.

“The Grand Budapest Hotel,” his seventh feature, expands upon this kind of earnestness. It’s a cute caper narrative with some elaborate set pieces, but in many ways it’s his most adult film since “The Royal Tennebaums,” boasting by far the most extravagant cast since, well, Tennenbaums. (It seems that once you’ve been in a Wes Anderson film, you are contractually obligated to appear in every subsequent one).

I want to examine one brief, wordless, but unquestionably crucial scene, one that I consider to be a cipher for the film as a whole.

Partway into the narrative, the film’s lead character Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes at his absolute best, speaking faster than a speeding bullet) is detained and thrown into some cross between a prison and a concentration camp. A plot is organized for him to escape, and this being a Wes Anderson picture, the plot is necessarily elaborate and requires sneaking in a number of digging instruments through the prison’s tight security.

Shortly thereafter we cut to a prison guard who inspects all of the incoming mail. The architecture of this facility almost perfectly suggests Robert Bresson’s “A Man Escaped” (1956) but the costumes undoubtedly signal Auschwitz. Auschwitz references in a Wes Anderson film? You read that correctly. And it’s not a superfluous reference either. There is a drab suffocating quality to the air in this prison that suggests all hope is doomed.

We watch as each incoming piece of mail is brutally hacked by the attending guard. Loafs of bread and food sent to inmates? Down comes a machete. A parcel modestly wrapped in parchment paper? The machete strikes down swiftly. Each gift for the prisoners is torn to shreds to ensure nothing mischievous sneaks through.

But then along comes a different package. This one is an ornate pink box donned with an attractive bow. The bow unties and the walls of the box fall neatly and symmetrically to the sides. Framed perfectly in this small geometrical wonder are three hammers to assist Gustave in his escape, only they are decorated as pastries.

The obviousness of what’s being concealed in these pastries provides the sequence’s humor, but the prison guard cannot help but be moved by the ornate design of the packaging, or the delectable application of the icing. He’s touched, and Anderson pans up to his curious face to ensure we understand this. The guard allows the package to move on, the machete temporarily kept at bay.

I’m not the first to acknowledge this scene as a kind of synecdoche for the overall message of the film. Sam Adams of Indiewire was wise to title his review of the film “A Pastry Covered Hammer,” noting the profound seriousness hidden just beneath the sparkling surface of Anderson’s seventh feature.

A pastry covered-hammer: that is “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”

While at first glance it may appear to be Anderson’s most ornate and stylized pictures, it’s also by far his most political film. And it’s a strangely acute one at that.

The film’s message? If only more people cared about the little things in life—a perfectly decorated pastry, the appropriate greetings to visiting guests, impeccable manners, etc.—than maybe the horrors of world would be a tad less frequent. Perhaps if there were a few more Gustaves and a few less prison guards, Auschwitz may have never happened.

While it packs heavy film references, Anderson has been quite vocal that the primary influence on this new film is 1930s Viennese writer Stefan Zweig, who lamented the rise of fascism in Europe.

In Nick Pinkerton’s recent review of the film, he references a quote attributed to another Viennese writer, Karl Kraus. It’s a quote that gets to the heart of the passion of Gustave H and the little things in life. Pinkerton writes: “While the news of the bombing of Shanghai was on everyone’s lips, a friend encountered Kraus sitting in some coffeehouse and quibbling over matters of grammar. ‘I know that everything is in vain when the house is burning,’ Kraus said, ‘But I have to do this as long as it is at all possible; for if those who are obliged to look after commas had made sure they are always at the right place, then Shanghai would not be burning.’”

And that’s Gustave H in a nutshell. There’s something commendable about his commitment to hospitality. And while he panders so often to the rich (specifically in his bedding of rich, blonde octogenarians), he also cares deeply about his modest and poor protégé, the film’s protagonist Zero Mustafa (played by Tony Rivoli, a welcome addition to the Andersonian cannon). Gustave later sees to it that Zero inherits the hotel in his passing, and even if Zero is unable to stop the oncoming war and the rise of fascism, his recognition of a glorious past keeps him optimistic.

The film opens with a framing device (a girl reading a book at a writer’s grave) within a framing device (that writer addressing the audience in 1985) within a framing device (that writer first visiting the eponymous hotel in 1968). While it may seem like a superfluous Russian doll set up, the tone of these temporal shifts is in keeping with the film’s overall project. There’s a sense of nostalgia that gains weight as Anderson dives further in the past. The unseemly concrete exterior and drab interior colors during the sequences in 1968 remind us of the aesthetic volatility of communism, and allow us to yearn for the exuberant pinks of the pre-war years.

In just a few short cuts, Wes Anderson has created in his viewer a true sense of nostalgia that allows us to connect with Zero, who we find recounting his story as an old man in 1968. It’s not just a gimmick; it’s a well-planned narrative device. And it is about time we start taking Wes Anderson seriously, despite how cute the icing on his films may appear to be.

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