Grand Budapest Hotel (2014 film)

Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel makes an extremely strong (early) case for film of the year. Armed with Anderson's trademark quirkiness and brought to life with verve by a cast of terrific actors, Budapest is an original and frequently funny escapade that easily rivals prior films in the director's masterful canon.

 The film's events, which unfold at a frantic pace and hardly seamlessly, are relayed to the audience via the elderly 'Zero' (Abraham) who is narrating the backstory of the hotel to an unnamed author (Law). The film then jumps from the '80s to the point of view of Fiennes' Gustave H (perfectly cast), runner of the grand Budapest Hotel in the early 1930s whom talks in a rapid-fire fashion and wittily addresses his charges as he efficiently goes about running the establishment.

 A young emigre Zero (played by relative newcomer Tony Revolori) is the lobby boy who is serving an apprenticeship under H and does his mightiest to please his rather demanding mentor. When Gustave H is implicated in the murder of Madame Z, with whom he shared an unusual courtship, he and Zero are forced to evade authorities and ensure the survival and longterm wellbeing of their beloved hotel, after its inheritance by the devious son of the deceased (Adrien Brody). Included amongst all this is a very amusing, drawn out jailbreak, masterminded by a fellow inmate (Harvey Keitel). 

The film has all the markings of an Anderson film, an ensemble cast featuring many Anderson regulars (Bill Murray, Adrien Brody, Edward Norton amongst them), hallmark visual flourish (many shots resemble postcards, contrasted with yellowed, slight sepia look of others) as well as rococo intertitles, and an extremely dense (in terms of dialogue) screenplay which is consistently funny and quick-witted. The snow kart pursuit on an icy mountaintop before reaching the edge of a hazardous precipice, a high. 

Anderson's varied camerawork occasionally disorient and has the (welcoming) effect of swirling the viewer up in the maelstrom. Whereas Moonrise Kingdom was set on an isolated island, and Tenenbaums focused on the trials and tribulations of a family with a focus on kin relations and peculiarities, Budapest is an Odyssean quest of a film, globetrotting and regular changes of setting abound. 

The movie also benefits from the stentorian narration of veteran thespian F Murray Abraham who gives a further sense of what Zero was going through amid the chaos of the misadventure. Grand Budapest Hotel is a cut above, smart, amusing and dramatically involving, the sublime cast, distinct visuality and superb screenplay elevate this to 'excellent status'.

8.6/10