I saw this film yesterday and although the spoiler looked good- I was sorely disappointed. Everything seemed amissed, off-kilter, needlessly convoluted when in fact the central narrative style- simply a story told over dinner- was as simple, uncreative and cliched as ending the story with: '...it was all a dream'. I was especially frustrated as I had no one to mull over this film with, so I walked home with my disappointment and confusion. However, you seem to have preempted my misgivings (almost all of them). From the puzzle of what an Arab lobby boy found himself in fictional Eastern? Europe to the relevance of Gustave H's sexuality to the realism of libertarian 'toyboish' role. You write with clarity from an obviously complex mind. I wish your writing was accessible to more people (I stumbled upon souciant.com having woken up from a nap with the word 'souciant' in my head and a compulsion to search for its meaning). It contrasts what I read from the Guardian, UK film critics, who simply seems to be a man with a pen (laptop), power and influence who spouts his opinion and ratings with little analysis no obvious justifications. Great work, I am hooked.

Saw it last night. There are spoilers to follow, so stop reading if you want to avoid them.

Let me start by saying I'm a fan, typically, of Anderson. This movie really missed the mark for me, however. The normal Anderson tricks were there, the beautiful set design, the wonderfully acted witty banter, the dream like scenarios. In short, it had almost all the elements of a Wes Anderson that I usually like. But it was missing one great element: story. For me, unless I'm watching a really out there experimental movie or something, story is the foundation on which the house is built. If you don't have it, you have nothing.

Here, the story basically boils down to a really convoluted path to inherited wealth, and nothing more. Everything else that happens is kind of meaningless. The two characters who die who are important to Zero, don't die as acts of sacrifice to him, or to further the story in any way; they just die unceremoniously an unnecessarily after they've performed their functions as characters. In fact, Agatha, whom Zero weeps for in an obvious foreshadowing to an untimely death, dies long after the story ends. WTF? Is that supposed to be some sort of irony? Same with Gustave. His death happens after the film's resolution. It's meaningless, as Zero would have inherited the money eventually anyway.

Add to all of this the obvious SS references, and we're now wading even further into shallow waters, pretending to be deep. The SS contribute nothing to the film that wouldn't have been accomplished by normal police officers. It seemed to me to be a way to try to put layers onto a story that lacked them (a dress on a turd, as the saying goes). I didn't get it. He was perhaps trying to conjure The Great Dictator stylistically, without realizing that what made that movie powerful was the message, not the fact that the SS were bad. I like Wes Anderson, because he uses his whimsical style to explore human relationships. That works in a movie like Moonrise Kingdom, a love story between teenagers, and a beautiful movie, IMO. In Grand Budapest Hotel, it just seems trivial.

In the end, instead of a journey, we've gone on a roller coaster ride. Ups, down, twists and turns, but ultimately going nowhere. I think the analogy made by Charlie Bertsch that we need to look through the wrong end of a telescope to properly view Anderson is a bit off in this case. At the Grand Budapest, we have to shove our heads very far up our asses to fairly gain his perspective.

Great write up about a film I'm very excited to see. You had me worried until I read this paragraph:

When I walked out of the theater after seeing the film, I at first found myself unable to think about it analytically, because it had moved me so. Yet I’d never had the sense during the picture that it was affecting me to that extent; my attention, rather, was directed to the profusion of details Anderson is able to highlight: the way the hotel’s interior in the 1968 sequence so perfectly captures the color schemes of that era; the fabricated artworks that so effectively conjure their real-world inspiration; the excesses of different characters’ attire. If a film about an imaginary country in Eastern Europe can transform a Tucson, Arizona parking lot into a haunted landscape, flooding me with memories good and bad, I figure it must be doing something right.

I hope it can have the same effect in a Raleigh Durham parking lot soon.