My sequential gasps of delight at The Grand Budapest Hotel were not shared by my companion, whose gaze often wandered to the nearest EXIT light. “But didn’t you get it?” I insisted as we walked out. “The girl with the book visiting the author’s statue, the three old men in black on the bench, reprised later by the three creepy sisters in black, the crippled shoeshine boy, Serge’s sister with the clubfoot, the doggerel poetry, the greedy, villainous son and that wonderful, huge oil of a black boar at the reading of Madame D’s will?”
“No,” she said.
And that’s when I realized that The Grand Budapest Hotel is a writer’s movie. And probably not just any writer’s, but only those who’ve read so long and so widely among classic popular fiction, children’s tales, comic books, plays and poetry extending back to the Victorian Era as to see the wonderful mash-up of literary tropes that the movie is. I felt compelled to write a guide.
In the opening scene a young woman dressed for the 1940’s and carrying a book enters the ramshackle gates of the “Lutz Cemetery” somewhere in a fictional, lost, middle-European country. Three old men in black sit, staring straight ahead, on a bench. And right away we know that what follows will be magical, mythical. Because, you know, three? The Triple Goddess, the Christian Trinity, the three witches of Macbeth, the three pigs, billy goats gruff, bears and wishes traditionally offered in tales the world over? Three is a dead giveaway; a tale is coming!
The young woman hangs a hotel room key on a bronze bust of a man in round, wire-framed glasses. Other keys adorn the figure, which is labeled merely, “Author.” (It is actually (sort of) a likeness of Stefan Zweig, a world-famous author of the pre-WWII era, which absolutely nobody would know but which is terribly significant.) She sits and opens a book entitled The Grand Budapest Hotel. Ah, the tale will be about a hotel, but not a Hyatt or a Hilton; these are too banal for the symbolic foreshadow already cast over the opening idea. This hotel will mean something far beyond mere hostelry.
Next we see the author in a seeming filmed interview, trying to tell the story behind the book while a child, presumably his son dressed in a sort of military-school tunic, disrupts him by shooting a toy gun. Children are always harassing authors who are trying to work, but the tunic and the toy gun? More foreshadowing. The hotel’s tale will be broken by war.
And at last we arrive at that 19th century literary convention, the Tale Told to a Traveler. The author (Jude Law), suffering from “scribe’s disease” (characterized by a need for solitude familiar to all writers), has taken, in 1968, refuge in the now-derelict hotel that was in the 20’s and 30’s the epitome of gracious accommodation. There he meets (in the hotel’s crumbling baths, probably a subtle tribute to the bisexual ambiguity of the story’s hero) an elderly, lonely man, Zero Moustafa, the faded hotel’s owner. Zero, a lobby-boy in the hotel’s heyday, tells the author the story that will become the book that will become the movie.
Zero, a child-refugee from a fictional war-torn desert country, was the protégé of the hotel’s concierge, M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes). But it is the fussy, elegant, whimsically politic M. Gustave whose character must bear the weight of an era we, and possibly he, can only imagine as a literary conceit. A wealth of literary conceits, actually.
Don’t miss the crippled newsboy, the frequent Dr. Zhivago-esque trains against snowy landscapes, a funicular, singing monks, covert sexual encounters, an empty and eerily-lit museum, several murders, including the signature (and never-solved,
but see if you can catch that single, mysterious shot of a bottle of cyanide) murder of 84-year-old Madame Celine de Villeneuve Desgoffe und Taxis. (“Desgoffe” is the name of a French painter in whose style the movie’s pivotal “Boy with Apple” is painted, and “und Taxis” is the terminal element of an ancient and aristocratic German family’s compound surname, probably chosen just because it sounds so off-the-wall to English speakers.) Enjoy the painstakingly made-in-miniature hotel’s façade and its dramatic interior (shot in an abandoned German department store). But don’t try to trace the provenance of the “romantic” poetry M. Gustave recites at dramatic moments (“If this then be the end…” as he hangs by his fingernails over a bottomless, frozen crevasse). There is no provenance; it’s all just charming nonsense.
But despite the delightful tangle of familiar plotlines and the handsomely classic story-within-a-story-within-a-story, The Grand Hotel Budapest leaves one (or at least left me) with an odd nostalgia, a curious sense of something lost. The obscenely wealthy of my time seem crass and uninteresting. They pretend no standard to which anyone would attain. So despite the facts that I know perfectly well 98% of the population of Europe had no access to grand hotels and within that 98% all women were crushed by patriarchal cultural constraints, it’s still oddly nice to imagine the confection – a world of elegance, the arts, courtesy.
For some, maybe there was such a world. Stefan Zweig, on whose novels The Grand Budapest Hotel was vaguely based and whose ghost may be seen in M. Gustave, was such a one. Zweig lived in Vienna a cultured life, writing learned biographies and world-acclaimed novels. Fleeing Hitler, he moved to London, then New York. There in 1941, at a huge PEN fete celebrating his work, thousands of writers in attendance were stunned when he opened his remarks with these words quoted from an NPR interview with Zweig biographer George Prochnik: “I’m here to apologise before you all. I’m here in a state of shame because my language is the language in which the world is being destroyed. My mother tongue, the very words that I speak, are the ones being twisted and perverted by this machine that is undoing humanity.”
Zweig’s world wasn’t the goofball literary buffoonery of the movie, but the writer’s world that lies behind it. That world of art and letters, of depth and subtlety, was annihilated by Nazism. Writer Stefan Zweig, unable to endure the shattering horror born in his own language, committed suicide only months after his speech at the Biltmore Hotel in New York. I would be born two months later, and would remain unaware of Stefan Zweig until two days ago, researching a movie. I hope you’ll see it, and understand the meaning of a young woman with a book, hanging the key to a forgotten hotel on the statue of a bookish author.
This is what a review should be – what a smart woman you are and yet smart doesn’t cover it. I want to see this movie.
You’re gonna love it, Consuelo!
Oh, Abbie,.. you made me cry again. We loved the movie, had already decided we must see it again because it was so rich and multi-layered, and now with the guide you have written it will have even deeper meaning to us.
I’ve seen it twice already and could do it again. Some new dimension turns up each time!
I’ve been wanting to see this. Now, you’re further piqued my interest.
Definitely, definitely see it!
Thank you so much Abigail for your wonderfully enticing commentary.
I am reminded of my late friend , Al Rothstein , a fine artist and art scholar.
We would drive to New York City to see the latest exhibits and his comments
were wonderful and natural without being pedantic, and made the visit much
more interesting.
When I see the movie it will seem much richer for having read your column.
Fred
Thanks, Fred. I’m flattered by the comparison to your friend Rothstein, who seems exactly the sort of person Stefan Zweig wuld have liked!
Thanks so much for this delightful guide. I know it will enhance my experience of watching the film. NYer mag did a great review. Did you catch it?
Hi, Denne –
I read the NYT and a bunch of other reviews and noticed the lack of any reference to the writerliness of the movie. Shocking. 😉
OK, you got Bart by the second paragraph, and then I had to stop reading aloud, so as not to give anything away. We ‘all go see the movie and get back to you. Miss you at Nia. B
Can’t wait to hear what you think of it! Wish I could come back to NIA, but am in middle of getting goo from rooster combs injected into my knee. Modern medicine.
I know what you mean about needing a broad education to understand some works of art. I’ve been reading Umberto Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum,” which to be fully appreciated requires knowledge of geophysics, history, and film noir, among other things.
All of Wes Anderson’s movies have a magical fairy tale feel to them but this one is my favorite so far. Your guide will enhance my experience when I go back to see it again! Thanks for another great review.
Abbie,
This description makes me want to see that movie even more. I hope it is still in town. Rick has had a cold this week and we have not been able to get out. If we miss it we will get it on Netflix but I do prefer the big screen. You, my dear, are an eloquent writer.
Lindy
Thanks so much for this! It is the first post I have read on your blog, having been guided to your blog by my sister, who I guided to your novels some years ago. I really want to see this movie! It sounds very noir (and I love noir). Also, I plan to investigate the work of Wes Anderson. (I hope the rooster goo was effective.) Cheers.
Hi, Nola –
Do see the movie; it’s wonderful! Rooster goo lasts for 6 months, after which comes the titanium knee. Hi to your sister!
Abbie
Thank you SO MUCH for this! A wonderful guide. The movie was incredible, beautiful and charming (all of which reasons for why I now own it.)
Thanks, Jon. I got the CD and for weeks played it incessantly in the car. Think I’ll get the DVD, too!
Abbie
Could you elaborate on the significance of the physical handicaps? I still don’t get it.
Hi, David –
Various physical infirmities emerge as tropes in literature, at least until recently when such references became politically incorrect. Think Tiresias the blind seer, Achilles with his vulnerable heel, Tiny Tim, Maugham’s and Flaubert’s clubfooted characters, etc. The infirmity may be seen as a placeholder or symbol for he courage and tenacity necessary to overcome obstacles. Budapest doesn’t fail to employ several, reprising pre-contemporary popular literature.
I read your review a couple of days after seeing the movie, and really appreciate all your detail. I had no idea ahead of time that this film would be so wonderfully, weirdly funny. The American accents of all these oh-so-European characters contributed to the fantasy of it all. And the music . . . for me, especially. As an old German major I knew of Stefan Zweig, but didn’t remember enough to talk coherently about him when his name popped up. Thanks a bunch!
Thanks, Sarah, glad you enjoyed it. I wonder of Students of German still hear about Zweig, hope he’s around somewhere and able to enjoy the wonderful mash-up of his novels that is that movie!
The Grand Budapest Hotel captured my imagination from the first of already many viewings. It is wonderfully written, acted, and filmed. Funny, provocative, and yet incomprehensibly melancholy — now, because of your commentary, understandably so. Thank you for giving me an even greater appreciation for the content of the Grand Budapest. This movie certainly makes my top ten list, and now I have an interest in looking into the writings of Stefan Zweig. Thanks, again!
Thanks, Tommy. Yes, that incomprehensible melancholy! I think the movie’s brilliance lies in its ability to rouse precisely that deep awareness of something lost that may never have existed at all. And yet we yearn to believe that it did, or may yet, somewhere, somehow. Like you, I’ve seen it many times and will again. I never tire of it. And like you, I also read Zweig after researching the movie. You’ll see some of the inspiration for the Grand Hotel B. in his novels, and yet the movie has a peculiar (and to us, profound) effect that transcends the inspiration. Purple prose, but you’ll know what I mean.
What an incredibly brilliant and well written review.
Thank you, Judy. I suspect that there may be a disparate but intense cult comprised of those who can’t shake the impact of that movie. I’m definitely in it!
Abigail, you might be interested to know that Thurn und Taxis is a famous German family name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurn_und_Taxis, and a likely source of naming inspiration in the film.
Figured that was where they got it!
Desgoffe also is german for slaughter; Slaughter und taxis, death and taxes (Ik I’m reaching).
Love that!
Many thanks Abigail, your explanation has been delightful. We re-lived the movie as we read your piece, learning much in the process! This movie has been on our “to-watch” list for years, amidst covid19 quiet weekends we are getting through the list :).