The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wes Anderson is currently exploring darker, deeper territory than he ever has in The Grand Budapest Hotel, the most melancholy and sad of his movies, and although it looks like a gorgeous confection, I am not sure that the feelings it evokes and Anderson's ultra-refined style mesh smoothly. Perhaps his depth as an artist has outgrown his style.
It is, as usual, visually ravishing.The lovely cinematography is by Robert Yeoman. The costume and production design are spectacular.
It is also an intricate Chinese box of stories. A writer (Tom Wilkinson) remembers when he used to visit the decrepit Hotel Zubrowka, empty and decaying under communist rule, when he was young and looked like Jude Law. There he meets the once owner of the hotel, Mr. Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham) who then tells the story of how he came to own it, when he apprenticed as a young lad (the charming and deadpan Tony Revolori) under the tutelage of the concierge to end all concierges, Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes).
Gustave is the epitome of civilization and a bit of a louche. He seduces the guests, be they male or female, yet he is heroically polite and true to his principles, which he bends on occasion for mostly practical reasons. Fiennes inhabits this man with quicksilver subtlety. He either recites long strands of adorned dialogue and romantic poetry, or is curt, sharp and vulgar the next breath. He does not stoop to caricature; he is precise but not punctilious, polite but never supercilious. He creates one of Anderson's most dimensional characters. He carries the movie beyond the arch and twee and slightly nonchalant, and gives it enormous dignity. He also looks like he bears an incredibly sad burden under his cheerful aplomb. He is nostalgia personified.
There is a very complicated plot about a will left by an old widow (Tilda Swinton, unrecognizable behind massive wrinkles) and her evil, greedy family that craves her fortune. And a business about the destruction of civilization by a Nazi-like regime, brutish totalitarian thugs with no use for art, culture or refinement.
There is more horror than usual. The story is lovely, the undercurrent of loss truly profound and moving. The loss of home, family ties, the loves of your life, of a world, the loss of nostalgia itself, of old fashioned storytelling, of the past, the loss of the idea of Europe as the wellspring of civilization art and sensibility. This does not prevent Gustave from spouting some prejudiced generalizations about immigrants like Zero, in case anybody accuses Anderson of glorifying colonial empires.
I share with him the nostalgia for something we are both too young to miss. A sense of loss of something we will never see again. He gets the seventies communist decor right (although significantly less drab), he gets the Mitteleuropa vibe right.
The sad layers of lost worlds burrow under your skin.
I have always liked Anderson's style, his charming visual gags, his technical panache. Every frame is rich with little visual winks. This movie is the cinematic equivalent of a rich and luscious cake of many tiers. So much detail! But even as I marveled at the beauty of every frame, at the sly wit of some of the sequences, at catching some cute joke on the corner of the frame, I feel that Anderson's style has become a little stifling. It certainly gets in the way of rhythm and it makes the movie drag, although one is so busy drinking in the images and chasing all the details, that it barely matters. The chase sequences are twee but lifeless, an escape from prison unfolds painstakingly but with little suspense. A couple of plot jolts work better, reminding the audience that despite the eye candy, we are truly invested in the fate of the main characters. But the movie feels like it needs fresh air, perhaps because most of it is shot in a studio and is deliberately claustrophobic. The hotel, the rooms, the elevators, the jail, everything is in constricted spaces. Everything is a square inside a square. As Anderson is clearly a gifted artist, I wonder what he could do with circles. What would happen, now that he is deepening his feel for human emotion, if he lent his attention to other shapes, different textures, other less meticulously arranged landscapes?

Moonrise Kingdom

Gorgeous. Every frame a marvel to look at. Great style, exquisite taste. Drollness, panache, a sweetly deadpan sense of humor, great visual timing, a flat affect that belies a delicate sensibility, sweet emotion without histrionics; a wash of melancholy and unfulfilled longing for more in life: in short a Wes Anderson movie.
Moonrise Kingdom is a wonderful experience, the story of Sam, a troubled boy (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward), who are in love for the first time and want out of their normal worlds where they are misunderstood. He is an orphan in a foster home where he is unwanted, she is the pouty daughter of two loveless lawyers (the great Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), and they elope, wanting nothing to do with a world with which they are at odds. It's a movie about children trying to grow up to be better adults than the existing ones, into people who can still love and dare and live life without making so many painful compromises. It is also, surprisingly, particularly for an American film, about the blooming of sexuality, about the age where a crush can become a romance and boys and girls become men and women. Anderson treats this theme with honesty and sensitivity, instead of crassness. It is so mature and refreshing, it feels almost European. Moonrise Kingdom is hopeful and sad and the most emotionally rounded and satisfying of his films to date.
It's also lovely fun. His quirky world includes a troop of efficient, much decorated Khaki Scouts, led by scoutmaster Edward Norton, and a storybook house where mom and dad communicate with the children and each other through a bullhorn. The look is a mix of faded color postcards, French films of the Seventies, Fifties style Americana, and that unique Wes Anderson framing which puts people at odd placements in the foreground and stages delightful tableaux vivants or intricate choreographies in the background. He is a great visual satirist and gets many chuckles out of the smallest details in the frame. Anderson's undeniably lovely aesthetic has more than a whiff of the obsessive compulsive, as he crams so much gorgeous detail into each frame. But he is also a gifted choreographer of sequences, and the movie is a mix of frames that almost look like snapshots and extraordinary flourishes of clockwork-like movement. A couple of these sequences take your breath away. A long pan through the scout base camp at the beginning of the film must have been aided by digital stitching, because it seems impossible to pull off in real time, and a wonderful sequence at the Scout Hullaballoo camp where everything is in twirling motion, with completely different things happening in the foreground and in the background - extremely refined visual slapstick. When the plot calls for spectacularly expensive action sequences, he goes whimsical and stages them with props, in a deliberately naive way, which gives the movie a storybook quality.
The cast is indispensable: Bob Balaban as The Narrator, who looks like a garden gnome, Murray, McDormand, Norton, Bruce Willis, playing against type as a sad sack, Tilda Swinton as a brisk entity called Social Services, who looks like a cross between a Salvation Army recruit and a Pan Am stewardess, and in a surprise cameo, Harvey Keitel as the boy scouts' supreme leader, which is surely the best joke in the movie. The two young lead actors seem new to acting and they have a stiffness that conveys the awkwardness of romantic entanglements at their age. They also have the kind of deadpan that perhaps could be difficult to coax from overtrained, hammy child actors. Sam fares better than the Suzy, who, although beautiful in a moody French gamine of the seventies kind of way, is really quite inarticulate in front of the camera. Even if they are the same age, or perhaps she is a little older, she looks like she is about to sprout into a full fledged young woman, while he still looks like a child, which is true at that age in real life. Anderson gets a lot of sweet comedy with his hero's nerdy look and big glasses, but all he can do with Suzy is regard her serious loveliness. It works nicely as a conceit but I had a wee problem: I did not feel that these kids were actually in love. It's a nitpick, because even without chemistry between the two, a sweet strain of romantic melancholy pervades.
Wes Anderson's multiple stylistic flourishes threaten to wear out their welcome, and the film sags a bit in the middle, but to his and fellow screenwriter Roman Coppola's credit, they always add lovely emotional twists that keep the audience enthralled. Moonrise Kingdom feels to me like the most melancholy, intimate and emotional of his films. The balancing act he achieves by combining so much artifice with emotion is very impressive.
As always, the musical score is poignant and exquisite. This time, he enlists the help of Benjamin Britten's "Young Person's Guide To The Orchestra" and "Noye's Fludde", to help convey the themes of how to go about your life step by step, and of the stormy turmoil of love, but the first work also resonates as a musical metaphor for the composition of a film, with all the different instruments/elements/departments coming into place to create a harmonious whole. The rest of the music is by Alexandre Desplat, the scouts' tom tom music is by Mark Mothersbaugh (formerly of Devo), and there are some wonderfully haunting Hank Williams songs as well.
Anderson, whether you like him or not, is a truly contrarian spirit in American films. He is a maverick, in his own quirky way. He has always bucked convention and I applaud him for sticking to his guns and making films with his unmistakable, and not easily replicated style. Actually, the style is ripe for easy imitation, and has been copied to death in commercials. What is not easily replicated is his sensibility, his wondrous command of tone, unsentimental yet moving, magical without being cliched, whimsical without being cloying, light yet substantive, which gently sways between arch, dry, funny, sweet, sad, and haunting.