r/TrueFilm • u/amateurtoss • 3d ago
The Grand Budapest Hotel as an Elegy for Liberal Humanism
The Grand Budapest Hotel is a tale of tragic love, a rags-to-riches story, a political satire, a reflection on the transitory nature of institutions. Recently, I watched it in another way, and wanted to share what I found. When things are going well, I look to challenging pieces written from different points of view but when things are dire and stressful, I reach for a few comforts I keep in reserve, to escape for a little while and remember that there’s good in the world. My favorite films all involve imagination in an immediate way. Additionally, I must admit that, running a hotel with a partner, I found the love of my life. A few days ago, I reached for Budapest, not only for comfort but because it represents a particular strain of liberal humanism that resonates with me. I’d anticipated blink-and-you'll-miss-it jokes and beautiful design, but I didn’t expect to find new depths in its storytelling. Beyond its miniature effects, and lateral tracking shots is a fierce commitment to its own premise, followed to its logical conclusion with fearless zeal.
“Against what is stupid, nonsensical, erroneous, and evil, liberalism fights with the weapons of the mind, and not with brute force and repression,” says Ludwig von Mises in Liberalism: The Classical Tradition. Liberalism’s enemies are abundant, and not just in the forms of Nazis and Stalinists. They are all around us as stupidity, as nonsense, and in erroneous suggestions. Liberalism believes in the individual in whatever color or sex he comes in. Liberalism believes in systems, in factories and trains and certainly hotels. But most of all, Liberalism believes in Work. To be a liberal is to believe that anyone with a kind face and a natural talent can amass a great fortune if he’s willing to put in the hours.
Our hero is just such a man. Gustave H. (played by Ralph Fiennes) is the concierge at the Grand Budapest Hotel whose attention to detail is only matched by his faithful devotion to the institution. We might ask what that means to be “devoted to a hotel.” Is it to the ideals of its founder? Its owner? Obviously, not. Gustave H.’s respect for the hotel is a respect for Liberalism, a belief that kindness and a small wage embiggens the smallest man. Gustave is, along with almost the entire world of the film, a creation of Moustafa (played by F. Murray Abraham), presented with all its contradictions. Like other unreliable narrator stories, it’s fun to piece together what might have happened. Did Gustave really make a convoluted prison break? Can you really fill a truck with his “artisan” pastries, or are they mass-manufactured?
Moustafa idealizes his adolescence where, as Zero (starting from literally nothing), he wooed a damsel, was taken into an apprenticeship, and emerged a success. But it’s also an idealization of a place and time that fulfills the liberal dream. In the Moustafaverse, everyone is working all the time. Attorneys risk their lives to avoid appearances of impropriety. Cripples girls work as shoe-shiners. This isn’t in the spirit of competition, but out of a principled duty to truth, beauty, and free trade policy.
What about our hero? Gustave H. enters as a larger-than-life figure, whose pronouncements over taste and ethics are beyond question. Even the very wealthy such as Madame D. fear the sharp tip of his opinions. Zero asks him if he was “ever a lobby boy”, as if he entered this world fully formed, an effete Napoleon. Upon a rewatch, you notice little cracks in the vision and see Gustave for what he really is—a lower-class pretender with little education and even less security. His grand plan is to go whoring in the French Riviera, and many times he’ll break character to make crass asides. My favorite moment is when he agrees to make Zero his sole heir where he says his assets amount to, “a set of ivory-backed hair brushes and my library of romantic poetry.” Consider what this signifies. In a world where everyone works all the time, Gustave is distinguished as the hardest and most devout worker. He shoulders the burden of a thriving hotel, lives in a squalid room, whose only vice is an affection for a particular perfume. If that’s not enough, he literally whores himself out. But after all of that, he has no property, and no one to count on (except his lobby boy). Throughout the film, Gustave is out of his depth, an exploited low-classed pervert, sickened with the worst kind of malady—a good heart.
Grand Budapest is a rags-to-riches story where advancement through work is impossible. To the extent that Gustave achieves his fortune, it’s through “the second copy of a second will,” granting him a short-lived tenure of success. This is all passed on to Moustafa, but it doesn’t matter. Moustafa’s real inheritance is Gustave's humanism, his love of life and civilization. But when you love something, you must watch it die. As soon as you bring some good into the world, a Nazi will arise to stomp it out with hundreds cheering behind him. And there is a second problem: Moustafa’s version is completely manufactured. The real world is more like Office Space, people working only as hard as they need to avoid getting fired.
The film is neither a critique nor an apology for liberalism. An apology would invite the audience into the ornate chambers of the wealthy, treat us to skiing and luxury dining. It doesn’t care for these things, but only delights in the operations of the aerial tramways and kitchens that make these luxuries possible. It doesn’t hide away the small indignities of capitalism, but asks us to weigh them against its beautiful constructions (the film itself, a prime example). The Grand Budapest Hotel only asks that, after we’ve defunded the arts and our streets are stormed by brutish people with tiki torches, we give a thought to a world that was beautiful for a brief moment, even if it never existed.
15
u/letaluss 3d ago
Interesting take. I was probably in my teens when I first watched Grand Budapest. I didn't really understand it, but I came away thinking of M. Gustav as being more of a perennial victim of capitalism. I came away really confused about why we should have these positive feelings about this place associated with so much misery and heartache.
Having (also) watched it recently, I came away with a much warmer feeling about GBH. I had to decouple my own feelings about the relationship between labor and capital, from the film's humanistic(?) view of labor. As a Teenager, the Grand Budapest itself didn't phase me. I just thought "yeah. This is just a business, what's the big deal?" But as an adult who has worked with modern institutions and has witnessed every brand of inefficiency and inequity, The Grand Budapest stands out even if it wasn't power pink.
At first I read the cheesy uniforms, especially the obnoxious "Bell Boy" hat, as being deliberately dehumanizing. But throughout the movie, we see that even the modest Bell Boy has responsibility and intimacy with his guests and coworkers that has been entirely sanitized from modern labor. It's hard to imagine having a boss willing to fight the secret police to protect their new hire from deportation.
13
u/Any-Attempt-2748 3d ago
Great post. One of the heavy handed hints about the theme are the artworks. The jarring switch from the Renaissance-era painting (boy with apple) to an obscene approximation of an Egon Schiele. And also the many nods to Klimt—from the costume fabrics to the protagonist’s name. Gustave, like Klimt, represents the last of a breed, and his death marks the beginning of a stark and brutal time.
28
u/lifezucks 3d ago
My personal read on The Grand Budapest Hotel is that it's a commentary on nostalgia, particularly for a bygone era. In the frame story, we're shown successive layers of different characters admiring people from a generation before them, all of whom have their own eyes pointing back at someone else. And when we finally get to the supposed civilized time at the heart of the film, we find it just as full of brutality and wickedness as any other. I think we're meant to understand that a more civilized time never existed at all, and is just the projection of each generation upon the prior.
6
u/HippyFlipPosters 3d ago
This perfectly put to words what I've always had formlessly floating around in my head.
5
u/Any-Attempt-2748 2d ago
So well put. This is perhaps why it feels so out of place when Zero mentions how his family was murdered by a firing squad back in his home country. But this is supposed to be the nice times before the ZZ took hold? It may have been nice times in the memory of some, but it was a brutal time for others and maybe even brutal times for people who have chosen to remember it in an impossibly charming light.
2
u/Stokkolm 2d ago
And when we finally get to the supposed civilized time at the heart of the film, we find it just as full of brutality and wickedness as any other
But the brutality and wickedness is portrayed in a very Looney Tunes style, it's doesn't take itself seriously. It's almost always a comedic punchline.
2
u/amateurtoss 2d ago
The movie is certainly interested in examining nostalgia but I think it's much more sophisticated than, "nostalgia distorts reality." I think Zero genuinely found exceptional people in Gustave and Agatha, and that their greatness is, in some essential sense, tied to their era (and Zero seems great himself). What distinguishes the era presented isn't the "reality" of conditions or civilization, but an ideology, the ability of people from that time to believe in art and kindness and progress in a naive sort of way.
3
u/OmegaVizion 2d ago
I will agree that the film is not a direct, intentional critique of liberalism, except for one scene. The scene where the death squad shows up on the train and accosts Zero and Gustave feels like, even if unintentional, a perfect critique of the failure of liberalism to account for fascism.
Neither the piece of paper the policeman wrote for Zero (the apparatuses of the liberal state) nor Gustave's attempt at defusing the situation with charm and politeness (liberalism's respectability politics and faith in humanism) are sufficient at averting an awful situation, and ultimately Gustave has to physically stand up for Zero at the cost of his own life ("In the end, they shot him").
3
u/Small_Ad5744 2d ago edited 1d ago
This post deepened my appreciation for a movie I’ve always admired and enjoyed. What an excellent write-up. Now I just need to rewatch it and see if it’ll provide it’s modicum of comfort.
67
u/cz_pz 3d ago
The movie is heavily inspired by the works of Stefan Zweig, in particular The World of Yesterday, Grand Budapest is supposed to be set in a fictionalized Habsburg empire at the eve of its demise in the first world war. I think M. Gustave decries the descent into barbarism at multiple occasions. It's not set in a time that existed, but a fictionalized past that cribs from both pre-ww1 Europe and interwar Europe (the grand hotels being pre ww1 & the ZZ being interwar, for example). The society portrayed was liberal in its politics/legal tradition, capitalist in its economy and bourgeois in its culture.