The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

I have long held conflicting feelings on Wes Anderson and his films. In high school, he was one of the first directors I discovered, and I fell in love with his work, but over the years, as I have seen more films, I have begun to find him rather irritating, particularly his smarmy sense of self-awareness. However, this has not prevented me from going to see his films when they hit theaters, or from enjoying them on the level of pure entertainment. From this perspective, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a rousingly enjoyable and magical film full of life and color. On a visual plane alone, Anderson has outdone everything he made prior to this one. His fantastical vision of inter-war Europe is a dreamland that can only exist in the movies. He certainly has a touch of Lubitsch and later Truffaut outings, but he just cannot reach the level of his idols. For some reason, Wes really loves it when his actors come off as nonchalant and anachronistic, similar to something you would see in an amateur production where the actors are clearly reading their lines. And more often than not, it all feels like a torrent of whimsy colored vomit. Yet, I really enjoyed watching this one. One thing Wes really deserves credit for is that he is great at accomplishing what he sets out to do. Armond White has taken to calling Wes, and his contemporaries like Sofia Coppola the "American eccentrics", a phrase which is both laudatory and derogatory. What he means, essentially, is that one cannot deny that Wes's films are well-made and entertaining, they are good movies, but at the same time, they are blinded by a naivety born out of class privilege. It is a bit unsettling that he just whitewashes the tragedy throughout the film, especially towards the end, when his fictional Alpine country comes under control of a fascist military dictatorship. Lubitsch mocked the Nazis in To Be or Not to Be, yes, but the tomfoolery served a greater purpose whereas here Wes is incredibly detached from reality. Not that being detached from reality is a problem, but politically-tinged humor demands a certain attachment to the world. But as I have already said, I really loved this movie, despite its obvious flaws.