the last civilized man
by
Douglas Messerli
Wes
Anderson (screenplay and director) The
Grand Budapest Hotel / 2014
The
location of The Grand Budapest Hotel in Wes Anderson’s fantastic new film is
not in Budapest, not even in Hungary, and perhaps not even in the former
Austria-Hungarian empire, but in on an isolated hill in the fictional country
of Zubrowka shortly before World War I. The original of this preposterous
vacation spot is based, so I’ve read, on the Grandhotel Pupp in Carlsbad in
Czech Republic and the Grandhotel Gellért in Budapest. But, as in most of
Anderson’s films, the “reality” of the hotel hardly matters, and he makes clear
from the onset that the outside of the hotel, at least, is, as in most of his
works, a detailed miniature. The hotel, although lovingly detailed within, is
not meant to be a “real” hotel but is simulacrum, an image of a world that no
longer exists.
Supporting this pretense is a
phantasmagoria of outrageous events that help us to comprehend the world of
Viennese author Stefan Zweig—on whose works, in part, this film is
based—described in his autobiography The
World of Yesterday: arriving by train, reports Richard Brody in The New Yorker, where Zweig was forced
to use his bag as his seat, the author was suddenly taken aback in Budapest:
I had gone only a
few paces when I had to rub my eyes to make
sure that I was
not dreaming…. Budapest was as beautiful and
carefree as ever before. Women in white
dresses walked arm in
arm with officers
who suddenly appeared to me to be officers of
quite a different
army than that I had seen only yesterday… I
saw how they
bought bunches of violets and gallantly tendered
them to their
ladies, saw spotless automobiles with smoothly
shaved and
spotlessly dressed gentlemen ride through the streets.
And all of this
but eight or nine hours away from the front by
express train.
Through his exquisitely purple-uniformed concierge
M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and the viewpoint of the immigrant lobby boy Zero
Moustafa (the talented newcomer Tony Revolori) Anderson and his cinematographer
Robert Yeoman take is into just such an incongruous world. Gustave, a
homosexual with heterosexual hankerings after older, blonde women, controls the
beautiful Grand Budapest with an iron grip as firm as Kaiser Wilhelm, but his
purpose, however, is only to give pleasure to his guests, which, apparently, is
why so many of these elderly women return to the hotel again and again.
Gustave’s world serves his guests with a subservient alacrity that recognizes
their needs even before they themselves do. Grand rooms, beautifully mosaicked
spas, and magnificent corridors speak not only of the Belle Époque, but of a
world outside of time and space. Indeed, one morning, when the nearly clueless
lobby boy picks up the daily newspapers for the hotel discovers a headline that
sends him racing back to Gustave, it is not in horror of the major newspaper
banner—that the borders are soon to be closed—but that one of Gustave’s wealthy
conquests, Madame D (Tilda Swinton), has just died.
In
seconds Zero and Gustave are traveling by train to Madame D’s estate. Stopped
at the border, where the brutal soldiers find Zero’s papers to be insufficient,
Gustave courageously steps up, in witty repartee, to protect the boy, for which
both he and Zero suffer painful facial slams by the soldiers’ rifle butts. An
Austrian Inspector, Henckels (Edward Norton), who often stayed at The Grand
Budapest as a child, steps in to save the travelers.
Reaching the Desgotte-und-Taxis mansion,
the two encounter a funeral already underway, followed by a reading of the
will—officiated by the family lawyer, Deputy Kovacs (Jeff Goldblum)—which
apparently leaves the family’s greatest work of art, Boy with Apple, to Gustave. And at that moment we meet the true
villains of this maniacal work, Madame D’s son Dimitri (Adrien Brody), his
murderous right-hand-man J. G. Jopling (William Dafoe), and the deceased’s
hideous trio of badly lip-stick painted sisters. They also meet, momentarily,
the mansion’s chef, Serge X (Mathieu Amalric) who, it turns out, was witness to
what is now being described as a murder! Given Dimitri’s verbal outrage over
the gift of the painting to Gustave, he and Zero determine to steal the valuable
art work, but almost before they can stuff it away safely into the Grand
Budapest safe, Gustave is arrested for Madame D’s murder and imprisoned in the
formidable Zubrowka fortress compound.
So begins a series of roller-coaster-like
adventures, including a hilarious escape that combines elements of Jacques
Becker’s great prison drama The Tunnel,
Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped, and
even Chaplin’s Modern Times. Horrific
murders and madcap events are heaped one upon the other, as Anderson
incorporates enough cameo roles (with regulars such as Owen Wilson, Bob
Balaban, Tom Wilkinson, Jude Law, Harvey Keitel, Bill Murray, and Jason
Schwartzman) to fill an epic. And in some senses, The Grand Budapest Hotel almost becomes an epic itself, playing out
so many capers that after a while its audience grows a bit weary, if not
utterly confused.
Fortunately, the marvelous Zero has
discovered love in the beautifully innocent and birthmarked pastry chef, Agatha
(Saorise Ronan), who several times saves the day with her Mendl’s cakes and her
own bravery in attempting to retrieve the painting from the Grand Budapest
safe. Her reward, so the elderly Zero (F. Murray Abraham) sadly tells the
“author,” is death from a disease from which today she might easily have been
saved. And with that we know also that everything that Gustave and his grand hotel
has stood for was destroyed, “stomped out,” one might put it, in the First
World War. Its later reincarnation, in which most of the tale is told, is a
world of shabby ox-blood and yellow colored furniture which tackily reveals the
institutions’ decay.
Finally perceived by the courts as the
heir of all of Madame D’s estate,
Gustave, again travelling with Zero, is once more stopped at the border. But
this time Gustave’s urbane bravery does not succeed. The man whom Zero
describes as “one of the last civilized men,” is taken out and shot.
Now, worth millions, Gustave’s inheritor,
Zero, is gradually forced to sell off his vast holdings in order, for
sentiment’s sake and the memory of his beloved Agatha, to keep the decaying
hotel he regularly visits, living in the small servant’s quarter bedroom where
he once lived as a Lobby Boy.
Zweig’s beautiful fictions, as well as the
works of Proust and others of the period, is all we have left of the grand age
of such civilized behavior and beauty. The barbarity of the 20th
century destroyed everything that Zweig loved, and in 1942, during the early
years of World War II, he and his wife despairingly committed suicide in Brazil
to where they had escaped. Even if we might question whether that fabled period
was so “civilized” as it presented itself, we have to recognize it as a
legendary era whose ideals are no longer possible to maintain. Ladies in lace
white dresses and mustachioed and well-groomed men who loquaciously offered up
heaps of violets and lilacs no longer exist—nor, perhaps, might we desire them
to.
Gustave is described by Zero has a man
who, perhaps, never lived in his own time; the same might be said, of course,
for Zweig, Proust, Joseph Roth, and so many others who lived to see their grand
visions of civilization crumble in the new century, with whole generations of
communities throughout Europe wiped off the face of the planet.
There are those who find Anderson’s
highly stylized fables as whimsical fantasies without substance. NPR’s Ian
Buckwaiter, for example, described The
Grand Budapest Hotel as “a culmination of the tinkly music-box aesthetic of
Anderson’s work to date, turned up to 11.” I, however, prefer to think of this
director’s films, of which the newest is one of the very best, as testaments to
the romantic imagination, too few of which exist in our cynical time of denial.
Either we can wonder about the vast power of the human imagination or wink at
it. I prefer to do the former—but along with Anderson, maybe with just a little
wan smile.
Los Angeles,
March 29, 2014
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