The story has three narrative layers, a little girl in post-Soviet Budapest reading the novel of a now-dead writer, the book itself a retelling of the story of an old man and his eccentric hotel in the mids. The old man played masterfully by F. Murray Abraham remembers a time when the now-crumbling hotel was a masterpiece of bustling tourism, and his early days as a lobby boy.
The lobby boy falls under the tutelage of Gustave, the perfectionist concierge, played to near-perfection by Ralph Fiennes. Gustave spends his time romancing elderly rich ladies, but unlike Zero Mostel in The Producers , he enjoys their company and their sexual attention. Meanwhile, the Nazi party is gathering power, with fascism and nationalism on the rise throughout Europe. The movie has a ski chase, a prison sequence, an underground network of hotel concierges, the looming Nazi party and the breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The movie runs with a wild manic energy, propulsive, joyous. Anderson achieved too much, in retrospect, with his first two films, Bottle Rocket and Rushmore ; he set himself up to fail. Rocket is confident, bold, meandering, funny, loose and exhilarating. Rushmore is quirkier—set in a private boarding school in some indiscriminate past—and has an astonishing return-to-form performance from Bill Murray.
Rushmore follows The Graduate in a lot of ways[1]. It has great music, with lust and innocence and infatuation as its themes; the tone is comic and melancholic simultaneously. The movies felt personal, accomplished, unique. Anderson had from the start a superb ear for soundtracks and impeccable art design, intriguing casting and arthouse brio. His next film was The Royal Tennenbaums , a huge affair, advertised as a blockbuster movie with an all-star cast.
It has a great cast, a wonderful turn from Gene Hackman, astonishing music and a knockout visual style. Anderson had grown precious, cutesy, solipsistic, decadent.
