A Very Wes Anderson Christmas
Friday, December 23 | 8 pm
Thursday, December 29 | 5:30 pm
Inspired by the early twentieth-century novellas of Austrian-Jewish expatriate, Stefan Zwieg, 2015 Best Picture nominee The Grand Budapest Hotel is at once a lighter-than-air screwball caper, and a wistful, and ultimately devastating, elegy to a vanished world. When an unexpected inheritance leads to a dust-up with the sinister relatives of his elderly paramour, Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes)—the consummate concierge of the celebrated Grand Budapest Hotel—and his stalwart lobby boy, Zero, are drawn into a dangerous web of intrigue and murder. Moving back and forth between the Grand Budapest’s 1920s heyday and its drab, late 1960s afterlife, the film’s complex story-within-a-story signals a return to the expansive literary sensibility that animated The Royal Tenenbaums. Anchored by Fiennes’s virtuosic, warm-hearted performance, and buoyed by a spirited stable of guest stars, including Willem Defoe, Jude Law, and Jeff Goldblum, The Grand Budapest Hotel is perhaps Anderson’s most purely enjoyable film—a sparkling candy-colored confection that is also a work of uttermost artistry.
Director Wes Anderson 2014 USA/Germany/UK 99 minutes R (for language, some sexual content, and violence) DCP
