The Grandest Budapest Hotel

By Conor Ammett

Another brilliant and dynamic film by Wes Anderson; the Grand Budapest Hotel is expertly cast, acted, filmed, edited and directed by the team that cooperated to work on it. No matter which area of filmmaking you turn to, the Grand Budapest has won awards. For example, the casting directors for this gorgeous moving picture (Douglas Aibel and Jina Jay), won an EDA award in 2015 for their work on Grand Budapest. Both have woven many elegant ensembles together before, in films such as Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson), The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson), Infinitely Polar Bear (Maya Forbes) and War Horse (Steven Spielberg). The movie won a total of four Academy Awards, including Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling. This particular award was no doubt won because of the tireless efforts of Frances Hannon and Mark Coulier, who spent five hours transforming Tilda Swinton into an eighty year old rich, decrepit woman.

The narrative, based in the Republic of Zubrowka (a fictional Central European state), changes so quickly that if you blink, you may miss a key part of action. You wouldn’t want to blink during this movie regardless, due to the copious amount of care that has gone into the set and prop design. The story surrounds a pompous, but loveable middle-aged hotel concierge and an adolescent lobby boy who draws on a fake moustache every day as we track their adventures with a violent family, an expensive painting and a dead lover.

Anderson has utilised animation and live-action filming in Grand Budapest, in an acutely Wes Anderson-esque way. In very wide shots we see adorable cartoon figures darting through snow and rocketing up elevators. The film is split into seven parts, including a prologue and an epilogue. These different parts, each wonderfully unique, are presented to us using quaintly decorated title screens, usually including a different key to represent a different hotel. 

If you have not seen an Anderson film before, you will notice something very rare about his films compared to most mainstream titles – he incorporates both impressive dialogue and riveting cinematography. Robert D. Yeoman, the man behind the camera in Moonrise Kingdom, the Royal Tenenbaums and the Grand Budapest Hotel, uses a deeply satisfying mixture of close up, high and low, middle and panning shots to appeal visually to every set of eyes. Any filmmaker would be jealous of the impeccable panning harnessed in his films.

This film is almost flawless and received superbly positive critical acclaim from around the globe. Rotten Tomatoes gave the film 92% and Metacritic reported a score of 88 from 100. With actors like Ralph Fiennes, Willem Dafoe, Saoirse Ronan and Bill Murray, the Grand Budapest is ineffable in the best possible way, and caters to a diverse global audience.