Featuring an all star cast and a wonderful story, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a beautiful film. It brought to mind Amélie with its strong use of color and costume and brilliant set dressing. It was a bit of nostalgia wrapped up with a bow. A visit to a world that is gone, and perhaps, a world that never existed in the first place.
We do a bit of hopping about in time and slip easily into the narrative of one person after another. How one came to be here or there and own this or that. How fate intervened and how the wind of fortune doesn’t always blow in the right direction for everyone.
This is a story told in a story told in a story. What is real? Well, it’s a movie, none of it’s real. And this is the kind of feeling I got from bits and pieces of the Grand Budapest Hotel, what happens when we tell a story someone told us that was in turn told to them by someone else? And yet, it’s easy to watch the film and think all of it is real. In the sense that what we are told happened did, in the filmic world, happen. These are, of course, questions that need never be asked.
The Grand Budapest Hotel was wonderful to look at, listen to, and become wrapped up in. Odd things happen. Heroes and villains appear and do minor and major battle. There are a number of cartoon-like sequences sprinkled through the production so that you have to wonder what this or that really means.
The acting is brilliant and the cast is amazing. It was fun to see so many stars in so many small, often tiny, parts. And some of the jokes, such as one sequence where the Secret Guide of Hotel Workers calls someone further down the line, seem to go on forever, pushing the gag almost, but not quite, to the breaking point.
I really loved The Grand Budapest Hotel, and it’s been a long time since I really loved a movie.
