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Sunday, December 14th, 2025

Grand Budapest Hotel

There are two types of people in the world: those who love Wes Anderson movies and those who aren’t worth knowing.

It’s an exaggeration, of course. But as one of the most recognizable filmmakers of the last 30 years (The New Yorker’s Richard Brody called him the greatest of his generation), Anderson is also one of the most frequently derided, typically by a subset of viewers unable to see past his diorama-like surfaces and playful artifice. Those who love him know his appeal runs far deeper.

Take The Grand Budapest Hotel (2015), considered by many to be one of his best films and the only one to earn him a Best Director Oscar nomination. Told in flashback and set in the fictional former European empire of Zubrowka, on the surface it seems like a typical Wes Anderson production – a neatly arranged slapstick comedy of manners with a cavalcade of movie stars drolly delivering arch one-liners. Behind the veneer, however, it’s a tragic and impassioned plea for the values of taste, discernment, and art in a world where such things are becoming commodities at best and, at worst, targets to be eliminated in the face of corporate, technological, and political fascism.

The story centers on Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham in the present, Tony Revolori in flashback), a one-time bellhop at the once-famous Grand Budapest Hotel working under the tutelage of the great concierge Gustave H. (Fiennes). M. Gustav is a man of unparalleled taste and refinement, a professional servant in every sense of the word. He sees servitude as a calling rather than a vocation, and his only objective in life is to provide experiences – including sexual ones – for the hotel’s wealthy patrons (“I sleep with all my friends,” he deadpans). One of those patrons, Madame D., dies unexpectedly and leaves him one of her most cherished and valuable paintings. When the claim is immediately contested by her hotheaded son, who frames Gustav for her murder, it sets off a madcap series of events as Zero and his mentor work to clear Gustav’s name amid the backdrop of an encroaching fascist takeover.

Anderson’s politics in the film are not subtle, and those seeking parallels to current events don’t need to look far. Beyond the obvious political allegory, however, there is another lens through which The Grand Budapest Hotel achieves an aching poignance in 2025.

The age of user-generated content (via YouTube, TikTok, and various social channels) has transformed and, in many ways, destroyed the role of tastemakers while spurring a revolution in the democratization of creativity. The rapid growth of AI moves the world closer to the precipice of another such revolution. Yet as these tools continue to dominate the battle for attention spans, they threaten to diminish and destroy the very idea of personal art amid a tidal wave of impersonal, commodified experiences and “content.” We have already seen AI-generated music albums soar to the top of the Billboard charts in multiple genres. It feels like only a matter of time before AI-generated films dominate the box office.

By presenting a lament for a bygone era in The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson provides a stark warning for the present: unless we recognize and nurture personal art, the cultivation of taste, and the perpetuation of beauty, these things may be lost to history. And while the forces conspiring against such virtues may ultimately be too powerful to overcome, we don’t have to give them up without a fight. (MVH)

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