Wes Anderson vs. the Trust Fund Marxists + 10 Classic films for fans of THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2014)

If you're as keen as I am for romantic pre-code Lubitsch--The Love Parade, Trouble in Paradise, The Smiling Lieutenant, Monte Carlo, and The Merry Widow (this Tues on TCM!)--and love Wes Anderson's previous films then you surely can/have/will appreciate the icy frosting splendor over-melancholy birthday cake of their combined flavor in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), released this week on DVD. Those enthralled by Renoir will appreciate oblique references to Grand Illusion; there are also the McGuffins of Hitchcock to be found; clues and puzzles like the protagonists like The Riddler on Batman; the gorgeous colors of Powell-Cardiff-Pressburger; the candy coatings of Jean Eustache; the epic swirls of Cy McGurknikov all swirled together like an excited boy using his sister's dollhouse and tea set to relay a tale within a tale to his agog younger siblings. The dollhouse hotel us run like clockwork by assiduous major domo Ralph Fiennes, and his deadpan Muslim lobby boy (Tony Revolori), who gets the one girl in the film (the ubiquitous Saoirse Ronan) and grows up to be F. Murray Abraham, narrating the tale to Jude Law in the now gone to communist bloc grey hotel. Law's making a book out of it, which in turn is read by a bright young Slav girl in the final, outer layer.

Anderson's previous film, Moonrise Kingdom (see my best of 2012 list) surged with young outlaw lovers' momentum detached cool and fervent devotion it marked real progress forward for Anderson, whose past films all focused more on male friendship compromised by rivalry over girls generally too mature or damaged for either of them to handle. Moonrise was like if Max in Rushmore hooked up with Gweneth Paltrow in Royal Tenenbaums - and neither was tongue-tied or awkward around the other, but pre-possessed with the refreshing eerie confidence that the first flush of mutual attraction can bring, almost Hawksian in their cool.

the coolest romance since Bogie and Bacall in To Have and Have Not? Maybe

But the relationships at the heart of Budapest indicate a racing away from the palm sweat stress of first love back to the safety of the Dungeons and Dragons kids you left behind, back to the younger Indian kid neighbor who always wants to hang out and does whatever dangerous things you tell him (in my childhood, his name was Sinul and the girl who made my palms sweat was Tracy). But the return to the boy's club makes the capering and gamboling less vital, doomed as are all quests to recapture innocence, to climb inside the tattered remains of your old coccoon. The word on the street is you need to see this film a few times to get all the little details, but the thing is, I don't want to. I'm not even sure I want to see Moonrise Kingdom again, at least not at the moment. What if a second viewing dims my love? Better the safety of one more viewing of The Expendables 2. Stallone, now that's a man's man.

That said, the critical and financial box office success of Grand Budapest is a good sign for future auteur "quirk" art, which isn't necessarily great for art, especially folk art, the last bastion of hardscrabble art world outsiders. With its lovingly ornate tracking shots, quaint train set miniatures, impeccable 30s costumery and decor (bright pinks and deep purples), wistful rainy day isolation hinting of some deep meaning, about loss, perhaps, there's so much rich detail, such macro/micro fullness in the historical period--the last gasps of innocence before fascism, communism, and nazism destroyed humanity's confidence in itself, and cakes stopped being decadent--that The Grand Budapest seems to risk trivializing it with its endearing little sister's toys-style playfulness. It left me wondering if it had anything to say other than that Anderson wishes he could go back in time and live in a grand hotel before the war, or a nice empty safe place where no one knows your name and cavernous steam bath facilities and snowy mountain tops give you hot and cold extremes for maximum coziness. This Hotel is self-aware, which makes some of it inexcusable. Just because it's a self-reflexive fractal inward spiral narrative doesn't mean it can avoid the cumbersome duty of meaning something. As it is, it's just a reverie imagining how nice it would have been to be around opulence in the days before the Nazis destroyed most of fancy Europe; it's all dressed up and has a few worthy places to go, so why does it feel still lost?

Putting one's own private nostalgic wistfulness on the big screen, we know, is the purview of the rich who can afford to create their pet time travel realities, ala Woody Allen in Midnight in Paris (see: Oscar Picks of the Bourgeoisie - in Salieri Shades). These dreamers can afford to create their own past worlds to vanish into. So while a state-funded auteur like Bergman could create vast worlds of resonance out of two women's faces in black and white close-up, he couldn't afford to build an escape past; he had to hide out on a desolate island for most of his life, where, as we know from The Most Dangerous Game, there's no place to hide or run for long. For Bergman, stripping down his style only deepened his resonance, proving that where art cinema is concerned, more is less. Unlimited freedom allows for laziness; excessive details undermine resonance. Anderson can only create a few chuckles out from the vast quantity of faces, vast painted flea-markets of sets, miniatures, and cameras at his disposal so it seems only fair that the fascist uprisings that bookend portions of this film should occur, indication of both the iron curtain evening the playing field, confiscating the cakes and artwork to enforce a strictly drab color code, and the intrusion on the Anderson fantasia by bubble-bursting bombs. As for Communism, Anderson never shows us the starving, huddled masses who aren't willing or able to work 24 hours a day for rich tourists, the types who realize it's their right to be equal to any rich punter. It's them he should be scared of!

Viva La Revolution! 

That said, I'm on congressional record railing against the Trust Fund Marxist movement re: Godard (see: Sullivan's Jet Travels: Rich Kid Cinema) as much as Anderson seems to be railing against spoiled rich kid collaborators in Budapest, which is one of the reasons I respect his frivolous whims. Recalling the big split during Great Depression pre-codes between harsh reality films like Wild Boys of the Road and Heroes for Sale, and musicals and escapism, comedies and stories of the wealthy enjoying their wealth, the Sullivans and Andersons often don't factor in that their glorification of the poor is actually a rich kid fantasia, the imagination of a lonely Lord Fauntleroy whose only friends are the household servants and so fantasizes about how much joy and fullness he brings to their lives, justifying the one-way flow of attention.

For the middle class, the fantasy of being rich never includes having servants, but they're an inescapable part of real wealth, and as Hegel knows, never having to ever have to fend for oneself gradually leaves the rich so vulnerable--so dependent on hoteliers, bellhops, maids, and consierges when abroad--that it's critical to their sense of self to believe there's a means other than money by which these supplicants are bound to them, that the servants and hoteliers love serving them hand and foot, for service's own sake, and that they would never abandon their rich clientele to starve or have to pack their own bags.

Reality is surely different but in Anderson's world these usually tertiary characters all work their fingers to the bone, 24 hours a day, to make the Grand Budapest and its ilk excellent --why? Because they love to serve the jet set? Non, monsieur, because Wes Anderson's camera transcends both the trust fund 'present of liberty' Kane-ism and socialist hand-wringing of some of his peers without careening into the life-is-a-circus Fellini-ism. So what else is left in its stead?

Let us recall that quote from William Powell as Godfrey Parks, the rich scion who finds his mojo by becoming first a forgotten man and then a butler for a spoiled dingbat family in My Man Godfrey. "You're proud of being a butler?" asks a bewildered Eugene Pallette. "I'm proud of being a good butler, sir," Godfrey answers. "And  if I may so, sir, one has to be good to put up with this family." In other words, excellence of service is its own reward, even when those being served are undeserving, setting vast karmic chains in motion wherein even labeling someone as undeserving of special service is forgotten, as all judgment is suspended, creating humility, grace, and good fortune. There's not even a sense of class resentment in the effeminate reedy voice of the prefect of police (a slumbering Ed Norton), as ineffectual a depiction of law enforcement as Casey Affleck in The Killer Inside Me.

But like the 'glorious' martyrdom offered unwed mothers in soaps of the 1930s-50s after they work their fingers to the bone for undeserving illegitimate D.A. sons, there's the dubious aftertaste that this martyrdom is really in the service of some nefarious purpose. The 1% patriarchy plays up the grace and nobility of being a second-class citizen in this, the greatest of all possible worlds.

On the flipside of that there's also the trust fund Marxist, who blames "the rich" (i.e. his dad) for sucking the blood of the proletariat in parent-funded films. He's glamorizing the poor - but must I reach for my frothy tome of 'wise old sayings by butlers?' to find out what Burrows said to Sullivan in SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS (above) in order to dissuade him from playing amateur mendicant, that "only the morbid rich would find the subject glamorous?"

Godard is my boiler plate for this theory, but I still love Godard because he remains hilarious despite and even because of his leftist propaganda; he's trying something new with cinema, to connect the New Wave with Eisenstein, but no matter how didactic and naive, his playful cinematic wit endures. And the more Jean Pierre Leaud tries to look politically serious, the funnier he is. He's like Harpo Marx crossed with Young Trotsky in Love (below)

Godard's La Chinoise 

That's the strange rich kid cinema angle that is both transcended and indulged by Anderson's film. The leads of Grand Budapest (like William Powell) become rich because they are tireless, loyal, fearless servers of the rich. They reject the communist ideal of equality by force, due perhaps to proximity to the wealthy (and ample leftovers back in the kitchen). Their jobs are frivolous - bellhopping and major domoing aren't necessary as we all know from carrying our own duffel into a Ramada-- and so their indispensability must be underwritten by adoring old lady residents; meanwhile the unwavering subservience of the hard-working baker (Saoirse Ronan) laboring under the callous gaze of the bakery owner seems a bit strange - a girl this hot and fearless wouldn't need to sweat her days away in a bakery making ornate sugar-coated little cakes for the rich and imprisoned! She'd be a first rate government agent or high-end prostitute. And is there a difference? Not according to Hitchcock... or Lacan!

TEN CLASSIC FILM RECOMMENDATIONS 

FOR FANS OF THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL:

1. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

1943 - Dir. Powell and Pressburger 

****

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's tale covers a similar old Europe canvas in its chronicle of of a spy in pre-War Vienna, a duel with a German who will become his best friend, and two world wars, all as recalled in the mind of an old general while wrestling with his younger secretary's fiancee in a Turkish bath. Jack Cardiff's eye-popping colors and the superlative set design make even the war ravaged countryside beautiful and shares Budapest's melancholy air as the onrush of mechanized warfare slowly obliterates the sporting codes and artistic splendor, the colors, elaborate customs, flavors, and decency of old-world class system Europe. (also second pic from top)

2. The Love Parade

1929 - dir. Ernst Lubitsch

 ***1/2

One of Lubitsch's less-revered works, this has Maurice Chevalier as a romantic soldier who winds up marrying the queen of his small country (the sort that would cease to exist when the map was redrawn at the end of WWI).

3. Shanghai Express

1932 - dir. Josef Von Sternberg

****

What better place to ride from Peking to Shanghai than in a first class train compartment with two cultured high fashion courtesans like Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong, especially if they take such languid pleasure in shocking an MGM-style fussbudget boarding house matron. Dietrich is at her most luminous and morally ambivalent, and incredibly cool; her crazy black feather outfit fulfills the promise of the slinky black feathered collar. There's great fuck yous to the censors with Dietrich turning the tables on the old Professor Henry Davidson type and counter-snubbing an old lady with a dog, but even better is her teasing treatment of brooding British military doctor whom she loved long ago. When he tells her he tried to forget her she replies, eyes wide like a child's, "Did you try very hard?"  See: 1933, not 1939 was the greatest year for Hollywood Movies...

4. Trouble in Paradise

1932- dir. Ernst Lubitsch

****

It took awhile for this pre-code Paramount to resonate with me, but now I dig that it doesn't 'Americanize' the dialogue like so many lazier Hollywood films, instead playing up the linguistic difficulties where everyone in Europe is constantly searching for the one language each of them knows just a little bit of, as in the excited way the Italian hotelier translates EE Horton's story of how he got robbed in his room. Like BUDAPEST, a great fuss is made of getting the first class hotel experience exactly right, and there's the issue of an unscrupulous charmer butting heads with an evil conglomerate in order to fleece rich perfumer Kay Francis. While Herbert Marshall isn't Cary Grant, or even Ronald Coleman, but he's also not George Brent. He swoons well and convinces you through two layers of subterfuge that he's genuinely in love with the moon (he wants to see it reflected in champagne) and the women around him, each more beautiful than the last. (See: Pre-Code Capsules 9)

5. Grand Hotel

1932- dir. Edmund Goulding

***1/2

Greta Garbo is the melancholy ballerina who finds a reason to dance again after she falls for the down-and-out baron (John Barrymore). In another room a ravishing young secretary (Joan Crawford) succumbs joylessly to the advances of an arrogant industrialist (Wallace Beery, with a terrible buzz cut). In yet another thread, a fatally ill office clerk (Lionel Barrymore) drains his life savings in a desperate effort to derive some first class pleasure from this bleak and brief existence. Downstairs at the bar, a disfigured doctor (Lewis Stone) dispenses wry commentary as people come and go. (MUZE) 

6. The Saragossa Manuscript

1965- dir. Wojciech Has

***

Like the narrative framework of an Eastern European girl reading a novel at the graveside of  an author whom we meet in flashback who in turn hears the story from one of its participants, this film is told via an ever-more-innate story within a story within a story structure and set in a colorful past that may never have existed but at any rate is now certainly gone (and the film was made in Eastern Europe!)

7. Secret Agent

1936 - dir. Alfred Hitchcock

***

Set in the Alps (via Gaumont's finest painted backdrops), this tale of intrigue is a fine companion to Hitchcock's original version of The Man who Knew too Much. John Gielgud doesn't make much of an impression in the lead but he looks a bit like Ralph Fiennes and hey! Peter Lorre. The ever- saucy Madeleine Carroll makes a fine femme fatale and there's a memorable chase through a Swiss chocolate factory. One of my favorite $10 public domain titles I got as a kid, from Waldenbooks at the mall, in the early years of VHS.

8. On Her Majesty's Secret Service

1969 - dir. Peter R. Hunt

***1/2

Bond in the Alps, and a great skiing downhill chase, slalom, ski jumping, cable car rides, as well as the cool vibe of having to take long cable cars to visit the evil Telly Savalas' lair. He hypnotizes a bevy of socialite debs as they sleep using colored lights and his own grinning, cigarette-congested voice uttering instant mix CD-worthy lines like "You love chickens..." That part has no bearing on Budapest, but the Alpine adventures and clues and skulking is all on point.

9. Torn Curtain

(1966) - dir. Alfred Hitchcock

***

This later period Hitchcock film doesn't get the love it deserves, but Wes Anderson is beholden to it for the flavor of Eastern European intrigue and the near-silent museum chase scene (just the sound of footsteps for suspense, etc.), and the anxiety of being asked to present your papers and/or discovered on some communist bloc public conveyance. It's worth revisiting, and I wrote about it way back in '04 here

10. Million Dollar Legs

(1932) - dir. Edward F. Cline

***1/2

Co-written by Citizen Kane scribe Joseph L. Mankiewicz, with uncredited touch-ups by the great Ben Hecht, Million Dollar Legs is the nationalism-satirizing predecessor of Marx Bros' Duck Soup, which makes sense since the heroine in Legs was married to Harpo Marx. Cockeyed Caravan's Matt Bird calls her "absurdly deadpan." Centering around the fictional nation of Klopstockia with its majordomo who can run faster than a speeding car, the president (W.C. Fields) stays on top of his plotting cabinet through games of toss wrestling, and there's a Mata Hari-style hottie spy (doing a great Garbo impression, "I'm wery fond of yumpers!"). Budapest fans will dig the colorful cast and pre-WWII fictionalized little mountain nation vibe.