The Grand Budapest Hotel is an amazing story of adventure, war, love, respect, and intellectual prowess. If one could not progress by their grandiose style of fashion or copious amounts of money, then they would use their supreme linguistic skills to assist in achieving their goal. The story is set long ago in a grand lodging establishment called the Grand Budapest Hotel. Our main character M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) overseas hotel operations and keeps the building running like clockwork. The story in its entirety is told by Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham) who was affectionately referred to as Zero (Tony Revolori) when he was a boy.
We pickup in the beginning of the story where Zero begins his first day at the Budapest Hotel as a lobby boy. M. Gustave takes him under his wing and teaches him everything he knows on how to be the best at what he does. As their friendship progresses, they find themselves in many random and awkward situations. All of this takes place during the death of a guest of the hotel and in between 2 wars at the time. Now here’s where the fun part comes…
Normally when you see a list of actors in a movie you immediately assume “it’s gonna flop,” because most of them do just that. But if you take a look at THIS list of actors, it’s more like “wait a minute…. these are all GREAT actors” 😀 The amount of dry, quick-witted, intellectual comedy that is stuffed into this movie makes it so great, you’ll want to see it twice. Take a look at the quality in this film: Mathieu Amalric, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Harvey Keitel, Jude Law, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Tom Wilkinson, Owen Wilson, Larry Pine, and Waris Ahluwalia.
I cannot stress to you enough how amazing this movie is. The story is broken down into “acts” as if it were a stage play. Wes Anderson did an amazing job with this, period (with the inspiration coming from the works of Stefan Zweig). Absolutely love this movie and I will go back to see it before the week is over. If I wanted to break it down into movies/shows that you might have seen, I’d say it’s “Frasier” meets “O’ Brother Where Art Thou” with a sprinkle of “Inglorious Bastards” and a dash of “Hannibal” (but just a dash). I give it a 9.5 out of 10, which means if you aren’t going outside to enjoy any of the Memorial Day events around town I suspect you’ll be watching this movie 😉
-Jon