This film is like a Faberge egg. It is intricately and elaborately
designed and engineered, decorated with sumptuous jewel-like performances,
detailed and delightful. It
is also a temporal jewel box, with four time zones interlocking, spanning
(maybe) most of the last century.
It is also a comedy, and therefore never takes itself seriously. A comic Faberge.
The eponymous Hotel is set in a named but
geographically unspecified – yet precisely realized - mittl-European
location. Over the course of
the film the hotel becomes much less Grand, declining like Eastern Europe from
hedonistic decadence to drab
adequacy. The
presiding politics, though never explicitly stated, seem to move from monarchy/Imperialism through Fascism to
Communism. The parting
on the right is now the parting on the left, as Pete Townsend almost wrote, and
the uniforms change colour but the dominant brutalism remains the same.
The Hotel is, for a while, a bulwark
against this totalitarianism, a
temple catering to the whims and indulgences of its obscenely rich guests, be they gastronomic or sexual. Gustave, the Concierge, is it’s
High Priest, training his staff to answer their guests prayers before they are
even uttered. Ralph
Fiennes brings his precise physical energy and quicksilver intelligence to this
role, along with his (too often ignored) comic ability. He is accompanied by a newly
recruited actor Tony Revolori as Zero, the newly recruited Lobby Boy, who accompanies M Gustave in his
adventures and misadventures.
These
two central performances are surrounded by established leading actors - guests,
delighted to be invited by Anderson to be in his movie and grateful for the
jewel-like baubles given to them; from Tilda Swinton’s octogenarian dowager through Willem Defoe’s leather-clad hit
man, Bill Murray and Owen Wilson
as scarcely glimpsed fellow concierges,
Harvey Kietel’s bald
criminal mastermind, Adrien Brody as an avenging aristocratic devil, Edward Norton as an old style Army
officer, deeply embarrassed by his
own men’s coarseness, F. Murray Abrams as the older version of
Zero, Jeff Goldblum as a
(properly) frightened lawyer,
Jason Schwartsmann as the modern Hotel Concierge with much less poise
than his predecessor, Mattieu Amalric as a Major Domo,
Jude Law as the younger version of the author of the story we are
seeing. The older version is
played by Tom Wilkinson and based on Stefan Zweig, whose writings inspired this
script. Saoirse Ronan has a
more substantial role as a sweet-heart cake maker. The list goes on.
Each of these sparkle, but the true genius
is that of Wes Anderson, for this Faberge egg of a movie moves, it is driven by
smoothly engineered hidden clockwork and
Anderson is the master engineer and artist. It is, of course, a miniature.
An exquisite toy.
And what does it all mean? What does a Faberge egg
mean? Maybe it has something
to say about nostalgia; nostalgia for a time that never was. Maybe it says something about chaos
theory as applied to political and personal history. Maybe it simply shows us that in the face of
implacable ugliness and banality there is still a place for beauty and
originality, even if it only to lift our eyes and delight our senses for a moment. Surely observing such craftsmanship
brings its own reward.
