The Grand Budapest Hotel

About ten years ago, I noticed that writers in the U.K. were using a word that I didn't know. Certain works of art were said to be "twee". As I understand it, "twee" means something like "precious, inauthentic, overly contrived, annoyingly whimsical and cloyingly cute." An on-line dictionary informs me that the word derives from "sweet" corrupted by baby-talk. I admire Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel," found the 2014 film continuously engaging and, even, emotionally compelling but, I hesitate to say, an unfriendly observor might characterize the entire enterprise as more than a little bit "twee." A title informs viewers that the film originates in writings by Stefan Zweig, a droll claim that, I assume, bears as much relationship to truth as the Coen brothers' claims that "Fargo" is based on real events or that "O Brother Where Art Thou" imitates Homer. In some ways, Anderson's purported reliance on Zweig is even stranger -- it's a joke so abstruse that no one can get it since readers who know anything about Zweig and his writing are not necessariy thick on the ground. (I've read a couple works by Zweig and can see no resemblance at all.) The film takes the form of what was once called "the shaggy dog story" -- an elaborate, tall tale replete with melodrama and comical,if macabre, exaggeration presented in a slightly archaic, formal manner that seems similar to the spidery Victoriana composed by the late Edward Gorey. An enterprising bi-sexual concierge employed by the Grand Budapest Hotel has supplemented his income by sexually entertaining an elderly countess. When the countess dies, she leaves her fortune to the concierge. The countess' relatives are a group of mitteleuropaische goblins who engage Joplin, a hulking thug played by Willem Defoe, to steal the Countess' codicil to her Will and Last Testament -- the document that transfers her wealth, including the Grand Budapest Hotel, to the concierge. An important part of the fortune is a painting by an artist similar to Hans Holbein, a resplendent image of a boy with an apple that the concierge has stolen from the Countess' gothic Schloss and that serves as the MacGuffin in an extended chase that occupies two-thirds of the film. The concierge is accompanied in his adventures by Mustapha, a lobby-boy at the hotel, and he proves to be a courageous and loyal sidekick, a sort of Gunga Din to the elegant, if world-weary, hotelier played by Ralph Fiennes. This tale involves last-minute escapes, bloody murders, a prison-break, motorcycle chases, and a breakneck pursuit down a snowy mountain that involves skiing, ski-jumping, and bobsledding -- all of this action plays out against a vaguely Austria-Hungarian milieu imagined on the brink of World War Two. Anderson stages his narrative as a series of brightly lit diorama-like tableaux -- the film takes place within a series of nested boxes and the characters are confined within toy-like diorama sets that are symmetrically appointed and filmed frontally. The effect is like perusing the exhibits in an old Natural History museum, a series of theatrically designed glass cases displaying mostly static figures, all oriented toward the viewer in the dim corridor of the theater. In all respects, the film is constructed as a series of boxes. First, the movie has not one but two frame stories: in the opening scene, a girl who is apparently a member of the secret society of concierges, the order of the Crossed Keys (I was once one myself) goes to a snowy graveyard in the center of Europe, a place like Prague, to visit the tomb of a writer that she admires. This writer is the author of a novel called "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and, as she reads the book, it comes to life and is dramatized in the film: the writer travels to the moribund Grand Budapest Hotel, a place like Sils Maria or the sinister Overlook Hotel, perched atop a Carpathian mountain and accessible only by a nearly vertical funicular railway. In the crumbling hotel, the author encounters Mr. Mustapha, the hotel's owner, in the archaic spa. Mustapha dines with the author and recounts to him the story of how he was once a lobby-boy in the hotel and has come to be the owner of the place. As in "The Shining", the hotel is as important a character in the film as any of the live actors and the sets depicting the place are gorgeous and lovingly detailed -- although after the manner of a child's doll-house. Anderson films almost everything frontally. When the characters interact,they speak directly into the camera. (The movie is laden with about two dozen cameo-like appearances by well-known actors and actresses -- there's Jeff Goldblum, Harvey Keitel, Bill Murray, Jude Law, etc.) The mise-en-scene is almost archaeological in form. The film looks like the movies of Louis Feuillade, pictures shot during the First World War such "The Vampires" and "Judex" that use box-like sets into which the viewer peers to pick out the details of the action occurring within these display-case dioramas. Even Anderson's action scenes are essentially static: mostly comprised of an overhead shot of a still landscape through which something moves at incredible velocity intercut with frontal shots of people riding motorcycles or bobsleds. Contributing to the film's impression that it is made from boxes inside boxes is a bold technical effect -- most of the picture is shot in the narrow rectangular aspect ratio of the old UFA studio pictures, the ratio of Fritz Lang's "Nibelungenlied" and Pabst's "Dreigroschenoper"; this means that the scenes have tall black columns on both sides of the image, an element that contributes to the viewer's sense that he or she is peering into a nativity scene or the brightly lit inside of a Faberge egg. The film is not merely an exercise in style: it has a distinct ethic -- the film celebrates loyalty and competency and posits the mountain-top Grand Budapest Hotel as a kind of ark, a hermitage where the last virtues of gallantry and civilization have been preserved against the barbarism running rampant on the German plains below. It's a wonderful movie, intentionally idiosyncratic, an artisan, craft-brewed picture -- I thought it was moving and fascinating and only a little bit "twee."