All Wes Anderson films are ghost stories. The Grand Budapest Hotel is simply the first in which he allows the ghosts to tell the story themselves.
I don’t mean ‘ghosts’ in the sense of Jacob Marleyian spooks, clanking chains and moaning and carrying on. Nothing so obvious or improper. No, the ghosts which haunt the oh-so-symmetrical frames of each Wes Anderson film are the looming forces of memory, disappointment and regret, those intangible sensations of want and need which can never be redeemed or assuaged. The (often hilarious) intricate codification and categorization through which his protagonists move through life is an extension of the cycles of grief and loss which tinge their every action.
The trick is, Anderson never clues you in until the very, very final moments of each film. Moonrise Kingdom, for example, was already a perfectly lovely and exquisitely melancholy rumination on adolescence and the powerful connections which can form between outsiders, and then Anderson had to go and bust out a final shot to act as a sledge hammer of emotion, redefining the entire film in its wake as an almost dream-narrative of childhood lost.
But, you know, a comedy.
The Grand Budapest Hotel represents perhaps his finest bit of narrative craftsmanship and also his single cruelest denouement. Watching the closing minutes of the film, I felt almost sick as Anderson turned over his final cards and the beautiful, horrible shape of the story finally came into focus. What makes it so especially crushing is that Anderson tells you exactly what his game is from the opening frames.
A young girl walks to a memorial to a deceased author and produces one of his works. We flash back to the author (Tom Wilkinson) in life, then flash back further to when he was Jude Law. Law is staying at a dilapidated old hotel, a hotel whose primary activity is a slow decay and descent into ruin. There, he meets an elderly gentleman who appears to be in a state of almost perfect loneliness. The gentleman (F. Murray Abraham) decides to tell Law-thor the story of how he came to own the Grand Budapest Hotel. And we flash back once more, to a time when a rich widow died under unusual circumstances, and the contest for her inheritance turned a (fictional) small European country upside down in an absurdly escalating series of crimes and also misdemeanors.
And there, plain as day, is the center of the film’s gamesmanship. It’s right there in the structure: Before we ever learn a single thing about the characters and narrative proper, we know that the man telling us the story is dead, and that the shimmering elegance of the hotel will be ravaged by war and time and left a husk of itself. We know that the man who our narrator told the story to will also be dead. We know that all the frantic, mad-cap, caper plotting and intricate wordplay will be for nothing, that grief and inescapable want will be the only reward that our hero, Zero, comes to. In essence, Anderson is letting you know that you needn’t even bother investing in anything that happens, that none of it matters, a thematic point which is rammed home further when you layer on Anderson’s trademark for hyper-stylization, his constant reminders that what you are watching is synthetic and false. ‘Don’t care,’ the movie seems to say, ‘this is a movie. You needn’t care.’
But we do anyway. Isn’t that the strangest thing? As The Grand Budapest Hotel careens through plot points and mythology and characters and art design and banter to make a screwball comedy-player spit, it’s all but impossible not to get caught up in the rush of information and story. And it’s almost definitely impossible not to fall in love with roguish gentleman Gustave H. (a sublime Ralph Fiennes) or courageous baker Agatha (an angelic Saoirse Ronan). You fall as hard in love with these characters as does the young Zero (Tony Revolori, making a brilliant debut).
But why? Again and again the film returns to the notion of a dying world and the idea that the old ways of gentility and honor are falling out of fashion and being usurped by naked greed. Abraham’s manner as he first speaks of Agatha portends that, no matter how sweet the early courtship scenes between her and Zero, Something Very Bad is waiting. War prowls alongside the margins of the narrative, while Gustave’s gentlemanly (if foul-mouthed) manner is repeatedly threatened and dirtied by the likes of sniveling nasty Dmitri (Adrien Brody, reveling in being as nasty as he can be) and ultra-creepy Jopling (Willem damn Dafoe). This is easily Anderson’s most violent film, with cartoon grue and bloodletting punctuating more than one scene. If the world is bent towards chaos and destruction, then why even bother with trying to uphold moral codes and genteel behavior?
(It is at this point that I would like to stop and remind you that along with prompting all this juicy rumination and discussion upon the subjects of mortality, morality, and the intrinsic nature of suffering upon the human population, Grand Budapest Hotel is primarily a comedy and a very, very funny one. Like, MASSIVE laughs throughout the entire duration. Every actor is keyed to exactly the right tone and pacing that Anderson’s style dictates, and the result is a film that is bursting at the seams with jokes and gags and wordplay, not to mention a candied color palette that makes every scene an endless delight just to look at. Coupled with a screenplay that has been stripped of even an ounce of waste, this is a tremendously fun film, even besides all this other stuff I’m talking about. Cool beans, back to the contemplation.)
But the story goes on. That, I think, is the most important piece to all these ghost stories which Mr. Anderson and his steadily growing troupe of esteemed collaborators present the public with. No, you can never be free of the past, not really, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a future as well. Anderson has never ended a film on an unsullied triumph, but he’s also never betrayed his audience into despair. Whether it’s the Tenenbaums slouching away from the graveyard to an uncertain future, or Steve Zissou rallying his crew for one more mission, or even those brothers throwing those fucking suitcases away to catch that train, there’s always a sense that some obstacle has just been surpassed and the characters can now go on to face the next one.
Bringing it back to The Grand Budapest Hotel and the girl by the gravestone: The narrators may be gone, but the story isn’t. Stories don’t die, not so long as the telling goes on. The Grand Budapest Hotel may have faded into history, but The Grand Budapest Hotel has within it the power to bring the past back to life and return glory and vibrancy to a world long gone. In its telling of people that never were and places that never happened, the film is able to invest an audience so deeply that that past is every bit alive.
You can’t escape the past and its ghosts, Anderson seems to say. So you might as well befriend them.
