Ralph Fiennes’ turn to deliver a career-best performance under Anderson’s watchful eye, as Gustave H., the concierge of a mountainside hotel in a fictional European country on the brink of fascist control during an alternate version of World War II. Maybe it was the latter angle that helped Grand Budapest along to somewhat surprising Oscar success; it was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won four (makeup, costumes, production design, and score; the most of any other 2014 movie, including Best Picture winner Birdman). You hate to hand it to the Academy, but the film’s vision of encroaching fascism does lend Grand Budapest a thematic and emotional heft unlike other Anderson movies, which Anderson then brilliantly counterbalances by making much of the movie a rollicking, screwball-ish caper. The violence that lurks at the edges, allowed to stay just this side of comic in off-camera prison fight scenes and cruel cat murder, later becomes more matter-of-fact in the film’s narration, where a lifetime of devastation for young Zero (Tony Revolori) exists outside the beauty of pink-boxed sweets and purple-suited opulence. These stories, by turns hilarious and wistful and deeply sad, echo through the movie’s multiple framing devices, as succinct a portrait of tragedy turning into history as I’ve ever seen in film.
1. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Buena Vista Pictures/Everett Collection
I’m not capable of feigning film-critic objectivity about The Royal Tenenbaumsso even though this might be Pulp Fiction to The Grand Budapest Hotel’s Inglourious Basterds (that is, the more influential, template-setting artist’s statement that will probably always remain a signature title with perhaps a touch of dorm-poster obviousness, versus the more ambitious, historically aware, Europe-set hit that may actually be the better, weightier film), I can’t imagine ranking another Anderson movie higher. A spiritual sequel to Rushmore and, perhaps, a spiritual prequel to parts of Asteroid City and The Life Aquaticthe film simply follows the return home of child-prodigy siblings Richie (Luke Wilson), Chas (Ben Stiller), and Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), as they reunite with their mother Etheline (Anjelica Huston) and learn of the supposed illness that has befallen their rascally and neglectful father Royal (Gene Hackman), who is, of course, faking it. Reconnecting with a flawed father is such a hoary indie plot that it’s genuinely shocking how much feeling Andreson wrings from this scenario, with each of Royal’s adult children trapped in a kind of precocious stasis; remarkably, despite the performances pitched in a congruent same-family register, Wilson, Stiller, and Paltrow all give, yes, career-best performances. Even the legendary Gene Hackman—especially the legendary Gene Hackman! —has the opportunity to deliver a perfectly judged performance, serving as his true career capstone, Welcome to Mooseport notwithstanding. Also like Pulp Fiction (and, uh, not so much like Mooseport), The Royal Tenenbaums is the writer-director’s funniest movie in a walk, wall to wall with laugh-out-loud-in-context lines (“I’m sorry for your loss. Your mother was a terribly attractive woman.”) and exchanges (“I’m not colorblind, am I?” “I’m afraid you are.”). They’re the perfect ongoing warm-up for Anderson’s patented single-line devastation, here delivered by Stiller’s Chas, the angriest and perhaps most recently wounded of the Tenenbaum siblings. It’s always eye-rolling when clumsy parodists try to “do” Wes Anderson by essentially just copying the Alec Baldwin narration, the library-book framing, and the fonts of The Royal Tenenbaums. But it makes sense, too: When faced with a movie this wonderful, what else is there to do with it?
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