Wes Anderson makes great films, and he’s one of the few modern auteurs who have managed to create better films almost every time they step up to bat. The Grand Budapest Hotel doesn’t feature any bats (unlike Batman Begins or any of the other Batman films, which include plenty of bats and plenty of men), but it does feature a lot of jokes, making it a great film for people who like to laugh while also taking in incredible set design and cinematic aesthetics.
The fact that a film so late into Anderson’s filmography has done so well might lead one to liken Grand Budapest to Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. But I say that metaphor is kind of played out and doesn’t really do either film much justice. I’m not sure where this was going. This paragraph was kind of a waste of your time, sorry about that. Here’s a true fun fact before I segue: in the early 1860s in San Francisco, two stray dogs (dubbed Bummer and Lazarus) became best friends and roamed the city together. They were so good at hunting rats and teaching important lessons about the meaning of friendship to early San Franciscans that they became local celebrities and were off limits to dogcatchers. True American heroes.
Ralph Fiennes does a fantastic job as Monsieur Gustave H. but the prosthetic nose added to his face is some of the most inconsistent work I’ve seen since they tried to make Joseph Gordon-Levitt into a young Bruce Willis for Looper. I don’t want to be the one to say I told you so, but I knew when Fiennes had his nose surgically removed to play Lord Voldemort that it would come back to bite him in the broomstick.
But the thing about setting a movie in a hotel is that all the usual hotel issues come into play sooner or later. The titular Grand Budapest Hotel is overrun by bedbugs at the climax of the film, with the bedbugs declaring nuclear war on the planet. It was a surprisingly intense turn for a film that spends its first act focusing on who was going to get stuck cleaning the Honeymoon Suite. Yikes.
But when Anderson does something, he does it in idiosyncratic style. Rumor has it he’s going to arrive at the Academy Awards by means of the floating balloon house from Up, which he invested heavily in after the release of Moonrise Kingdom. Anderson denies that the floating balloon house was inspired by Pixar and instead insists that it came to him in a symmetrical, pastel-toned dream starring Bill Murray.
Amateur filmmakers hoping to use The Grand Budapest Hotel as inspiration for their own work should pay careful attention to the intricate ways Wes Anderson crafts his work. Spend hours studying the way he effectively casts all-star actors in every major role and the way he masterfully uses his $30 million budget. If you can replicate this method, your film could be nominated for Best Picture, too.
Final Score: Grand Budapest? More like grand slam, am I right? Another Wes Anderson masterpiece. If he continues to grace us with films of this caliber, collectors will never have an up-to-date perfectly aesthetically pleasing box set because they’ll always be missing his latest — and hopefully — greatest films. On behalf of what may be coming next, The Grand Budapest Hotel is hereby and forever more awarded the honorable 9/10, the most prestigious score this reviewer offers to films that aren’t Space Jam.