The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) review

Wes Anderson's films are usually described as dollhouses. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a dollhouse with a war approaching it from off-screen, and the film's considerable achievement is that it is simultaneously his funniest and his most genuinely mournful.

The Nested Structure

The film is told in four nested frames: a young woman reading a book at a memorial, the author narrating in 1985, the author as a young man in 1968 meeting the hotel's owner, and Zero's account of 1932. Each frame has a different aspect ratio, a different colour palette, and a different camera language. This is not decoration; the framing device establishes that everything we see is a memory of a memory, and that the world it depicts is already gone.

Anderson uses the nesting to make a specific argument about nostalgia. The 1932 sections are the most vivid and the most colourful, and they are the ones furthest removed from the present. The film's celebration of a vanished world is inseparable from its awareness that the world vanished for a reason, and the final frame's return to the 1985 present is quietly devastating.

Read more about comedy cinema in our Comedy genre hub, explore the work of Wes Anderson in our directors section, or see where this film lands in best films of the 2010s.

Fiennes and the Comedy of Competence

Ralph Fiennes gives the best performance of his career as M. Gustave, and the performance is the film's engine. Gustave is a man whose entire identity is service — he knows every guest, he recites poetry at dinner, he sleeps with elderly women as a professional courtesy — and Fiennes plays him with total conviction and no wink. The film's funniest moments are all Gustave being extremely good at something trivial.

The comedy is built on competence rather than incompetence, which is unusual. Gustave is not a fool; he is a professional in a world that is about to stop valuing professionalism. His profanity, delivered with perfect diction, is one of the great comic inventions in recent cinema, and the running gag of his cologne and his 'lobby boy' instructions never wears thin.

Anderson's Formal Apparatus

The film is Anderson's most technically elaborate, and the craft is genuinely astonishing. Adam Stockhausen's production design includes a full-scale model of the hotel built at multiple scales, and the film's miniature work is deliberately visible — a choice that makes the world feel constructed and therefore fragile. Alexandre Desplat's score uses balalaika and alpine instrumentation, and it is his best work with Anderson.

The symmetry and the whip-pans are present, but the film's formalism is more purposeful than Anderson's detractors allow. The chase sequences are staged with a clockwork precision that is funny in itself, and the film's violence — severed fingers, a cat thrown out of a window, a shootout in a museum — is presented in the same stylised register, which creates a genuine tonal unease beneath the pastel surface.

The Melancholy

The film is explicitly about the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe. The 'ZZ' insignia, the border checkpoints, the soldiers at the hotel — all of it is presented as a background hum that gradually becomes the foreground. The film's famous line about the world being 'mostly grey' arrives in a film that is otherwise saturated with colour, and the contrast is the point.

The ending is far bleaker than the film's reputation suggests. Zero loses everyone he loves, the hotel declines, and the 1968 frame shows a man who has spent decades maintaining a building as a monument to a dead woman. Anderson has never been this emotionally direct, and the fact that he achieved it inside a film this funny is the strongest argument for his seriousness as a filmmaker.

Themes and ideas

• Nostalgia and its limits
• The collapse of civilised Europe
• Professionalism as identity
• Memory and reconstruction