The Two Faces of January

When it comes to literary depictions of sinister amorality, there are few better exponents than the late Patricia Highsmith. Themes of avarice, criminality, latent homosexuality and antiheroism — if not outright villainy — pepper her refined, often cruelly resolved, novels. 

Best known for her ‘Ripliad’, a series of stories centred on the cunning protagonist Tom Ripley, Highsmith’s universe is both gloomy and often marked by ostensible elegance and luxury. Ripley was a calculating con artist, coldly pursuing the opulence, power and influence in no way owed to him. He was birthed from the darkness embraced so readily by his creator. Matt Damon’s murderously conniving, emotionally ambiguous performance was especially chilling in Anthony Minghella’s masterful The Talented Mr Ripley, an adaptation which rooted Highsmith’s horrifying creation firmly in the modern zeitgeist. 

The world of Ripley is that of the beautiful Mediterranean climes so attractive to the well-heeled American ex-pats — compatriots, of course — who constitute his prey. Indeed, The Two Faces of January plays out under the same azure skies of southern Europe. Based on Highsmith’s 1964 book, Hossein Amini’s directorial debut is a beautifully shot, genuinely gripping psychological thriller which mines the same cringe-inducing tension between courtesy and repulsion that rendered Minghella’s dramatic study of insincerity so fascinating. While the characters here are less horrifying than the parasitic Ripley, and the feckless Dickie Greenleaf, they are just as complex. 

Opening in 1962, on the bustling steps of the Parthenon, January introduces Rydal Keener, an urbane multilingual American wastrel who makes his living as a tour guide, gently exploiting college girls and creaming commissions from wealthy, clueless visitors to his Athenian patch. Fresh off his weighty turn in the Coens’ stunning Inside Llewyn Davis, Oscar Isaac imbues Rydal with a fascinating mix of shiftiness and likeability. On the one hand, he is clearly an opportunistic dandy, drifting from scam to scam and fleeing personal demons – a difficult home life in the US is hinted at throughout — on the other, Isaac skilfully suggests that Rydal is genuinely layered. Financial motivations aside, there is much to consider behind his faintly mournful eyes.

From the moment his attention is captured by wealthy New York couple Chester and Colette MacFarland, Rydal’s fate becomes somewhat more tenuous. The MacFarlands should be the perfect mark: malleable, gullible, loaded. Unfortunately for Rydal, his street wisdom is not enough to save him from ensnarement in their secretive travails. Played with sophistication by Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst, the duo are not exactly Bonnie and Clyde but appearances are increasingly deceptive. Ironically, Rydal, for all his lightweight trickery, emerges as the film’s least obscure individual. 

Witness to the aftermath of unintended violence, he spots an opening for a quick profit, yet is also vaguely bewitched by Colette. Kirsten Dunst is an increasingly serious, eclectic performer and her portrayal here is many things: lovely, subtle, loyal and tragic. At her side, Mortensen’s is a towering presence. While this handsome swindler, veering from genial and wise to brutally pragmatic, may be out of his comfort zone, he is not particularly out of his depth. Like Ripley, he is resourceful; less of a chameleon, perhaps, but possessed of a talent for survival. 

Thrown together, voluntarily at first, Rydal and the MacFarlands exchange pleasantries and superficial affection. The bonhomie, however, lasts only as long as an evening meal. From that point on, an air of quiet awkwardness is prevalent. These people, in truth, have only their passports in common, and even those are false. 

It is here that the comparisons with Highsmith’s earlier material seems most apposite. Granted, there is no moment to rival Greenleaf’s horrifying, toe-curling realisation that Ripley’s suffocating companionship represents more than an irritating obsession. Yet, as Rydal is sucked deeper into the bog, as his life and liberty are jeopardised, he appears unable to avert the inevitable.

In recognising the thematic tropes which underpin the genre, Amini, working from his own script, has excelled in producing a feature to rival Minghella’s wonderful vision. The British director is now suitably recovered from the ignominy of being responsible for penning last year’s Keanu Reeves horror show, 47 Ronin. Instead, he shows off the panache which spurred him to write 2011’s Drive. January and Drive, admittedly, share little DNA beyond their lonely, placeless leading men but Amini has accomplished the not inconsiderable task of pivoting from the latter’s stylishly indulgent, though knowingly empty, neo-noir to something infinitely more rugged. 

Hitchcock echoes through the encroaching paranoia as Rydal, Colette and Chester slope off into the arid Cretan outback and Amini ably harnesses the duality that informs it all. As Janus, the Roman God of transitions from which the eponymous month takes its name, observed the cosmos with two faces, so too does the film rely on the dangers of opposing viewpoints, whether deliberate or otherwise. Wires are crossed, situations misunderstood and identities shed. By the finale, the truth is the most elusive thing of all.

‘There’s a surprise around every corner,’ says Chester, sagely. The summer’s first great film is surely one of them.

Frank

Biopics have always occupied a particular corner of the cinematic genre. They can be noble, serious, forensically constructed and extremely long. There are good ones (Raging Bull), bad ones (J. Edgar) and downright ugly ones (Jobs). They are tricky, too. Even Michael Mann, perhaps the best pure cinema director alive, fumbled the task with Ali, a coldly distant study of boxing’s greatest showman.  

Obscure, crazed and occasionally tender, Frank is nothing like any of these. In truth, it barely falls into the category marked ‘biopic’. Inspired by the bizarre career of the late Chris Sievey, director Lenny Abrahamson uses the musician’s life as a rough guide rather than a closely followed map. In doing so he crafts a film which is at once a strangely affecting road movie and a depiction of skewed genius.

As a struggling musician in the early Eighties, Sievey’s decision to abandon his band, The Freshies, and try something new gave birth to Frank Sidebottom. Sidebottom was an unsettlingly warped alter-ego defined by his sharp suits, broad Mancunian accent and giant Max Fleischer-inspired, papier-mâché head. Neither his music nor his comedy would bring him great wealth or acclaim and he would die penniless in 2010. Yet, his creation — a grotesque, mildly subversive oddball — would secure him cult status and post-mortem cool. 

If anything, the head is Abrahamson's truest link between reality and fiction. In the title role (the name Sidebottom never comes up) Michael Fassbender moves his accent away from Manchester and places it somewhere between Killarney and Kansas, the muffling effect of the permanent, enormous, blue-eyed cranium turning his rich voice into a clipped monotone. Lithe and energetic, the Kerry actor appears to have a great time eschewing his leading man credentials in favour of a faceless, unpredictable man-child, vacillating between grounded practicalities — ‘I have a certificate,’ he intones, when challenged over the mask — and the obsessive pursuit of sonic perfection. 

Fassbender sits happily at the centre of an increasingly deranged creative process, observed, with genuine bewilderment, by Domhnall Gleeson’s meek keyboardist, Jon. Floating through a dull life in his bland middle-class seaside town, Jon is a listless musician and a bored worker drone whose initially pathetic tweets punctuate the screen throughout. He is keen then to grasp an early chance encounter with Frank and his awkwardly-monikered band, The Soronprfbs. Before long, Jon is relocating to a remote Irish island for the recording of this curious group’s new album. 

Nothing is committed to tape until Frank is ready and to this end, with the aid of his inherited ‘nest egg’, Jon spends the next year in a verdant bedlam. More than a wide-eyed narrator, he emerges as a layered and quietly selfish antagonist, viewed with suspicious disdain by abrasive theremin player Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and with benign indifference by Frank himself. The Soronprfbs’ music might charitably be described as surreal but the young man discerns inspiration beneath the din. 

Surreptitiously, he secures the band a place at Texas hipster circus South By Southwest and it is at this stage that the wheels truly come off. Gone are the aimless days of charmed lunacy, for Jon’s misunderstanding of what makes Frank tick is as profound as the frontman is complex. Whether or not the interloper is motivated by the desire to be rich and famous is unclear but he is certainly not on the same page as everyone else. The Soronprfbs are an eclectic bunch but each of them is in thrall to Frank’s musical proclivities; critical recognition and success do not feature much in their collective thinking. 

Where previously he was simply along for the ride, Jon takes control with disastrous results. By exploiting Frank’s vague desire to be ‘likeable’, he unwittingly stirs up the obvious mental illness that hovers over everything, a cloud which is, at first glance, amusing in an faintly obscene way. Frank and his good-natured manager Don (a restrained Scoot McNairy) share more than just a fondness for random sounds. Their personal demons — raw, unexplainable, unconnected to the clichéd darkness that Jon assumes to be their natural habitat — were containable in the isolated reverie of the island studio. In the focused scrutiny of the outside world, however, they break loose.

Frank never loses its light tone but little in the last reel is mined for laughs as Jon struggles to clean up after his clumsy excursion into treacherous waters. His fascination with the giant head borders on the morbid and so it comes as a great surprise when, in the wake of his psychological tipping-point, Frank’s human features are there for all to see. Robbed of his persona, he is a mere shell and, cleverly, Abrahamson shows a downcast Fassbender solely in profile until the end. Indeed, as the camera slowly works its way around to fully expose his gaunt visage, a returning sliver of confidence allows the real Frank to be properly recognised. 

An edited version of this article was first published here.

Calvary

He has only occupied the helm of two films thus far in his career but Irish auteur John Michael McDonagh may already have established something of a cinematic brand: acerbic, darkly comic, bleak. 

His debut, 2011’s The Guard, was a hilarious, strangely affable tale of an unpredictable — though brilliant — country policeman in the wilds of Connemara. Brutally honest and surprisingly sweet, its towering leading man, Brendan Gleeson, was almost outdone by the empty, spectacularly desolate backdrop of the Galway scrub. The presence of the ever excellent Don Cheadle, dropped into a locale so completely beyond his normal range, made it all the more endearing.

By placing Calvary, his sophomore effort, once more in Ireland’s windswept western reaches, McDonagh leans again on the expressiveness of such a startlingly glorious place, all cloudy greens and blanched, salty blues. Similar in look, if not tone, to his first feature, the director’s fondness for the beautiful gloominess of these landscapes takes him north to Sligo and a sleepy, unnamed town. 

What is depicted there contrasts starkly with the snide cheeriness of The Guard. Set against sweeping hills and verdant fields, Gleeson’s James Lavelle is a morose but well-intentioned priest ministering to the mildly grotesque laity of a parish existing in the cold shadow of the mighty Benbulben. There is comedy here, of course, but a pitch black chord strangles any jollity. The humour is not cruel but nor is it uplifting. 

The overarching theme throughout is of deep and barely contained anger. Sure, the setting is ripped straight from a picture book of twee Irish vistas but this is undoubtedly a country in which the Celtic Tiger’s carcass is beginning to smell. Indeed, that rage regularly threatens to consume the weary bonhomie. It is directed at the banks, repossessing all around them as their former foot soldiers — best personified by Dylan Moran’s ostensibly awful financier — grow fat from their ill-gotten spoils. The state, too, is a target of this bubbling resentment but, above all else, it is the church which sits at the centre of the disquiet. 

Institutional abuse and organisational avarice fuel the flames, flames which will eventually, casually, consume Lavelle’s humble chapel in an obvious act of arson. One of a number of shocking developments, it suggests, at that moment, in glowingly paganistic terms, that isolated, rural Ireland is no longer the pulsing heartland of church influence and dogma.

In this confrontational atmosphere, Gleeson’s taciturn cleric is faced with a startling opening line and a chilling warning from one unseen, abuse-surviving confessor. Killing a bad priest would mean nothing to the public, goes the parishioner’s logic, but murdering a good one, on a Sunday, would certainly grab the world’s attention. He is to be the sacrificial lamb. 

Given a week to put his affairs in order, Lavelle accepts his lot with noble resignation, neither sure of the threat’s veracity, nor, it seems, especially distressed by it. Over the course of the next seven days he attempts to bring about some measure of absolution, both to himself and his flock, yet his limited pastoral success indicates the diminished stature of Catholicism within modern Irish society. Lavelle’s presence is an irritation to many in his community, inevitable but wholly without use. People attend Mass out of habit but they pay little heed to the man in the cassock; some even seem to hate him.

This is a pity, for Lavelle is a good man of genuine faith. The peerless Gleeson has once again fashioned an avuncular and hugely likeable figure. The actor, fast becoming the cinematic muse in a creative partnership with his director, imbues Lavelle with a dry wit and, in contrast to his limp curate, Father Leary (David Wilmot), an innate sense of ordinary decency. In one scene, Moran — a Ross O’Carroll-Kelly of the Sligo coast if you will — produces his chequebook to make a donation to the parish. Leary slithers into position like some grateful donee of old but Lavelle, the populist, coldly, and honestly, drives up the figure, knowing all too well the greedy depths of the other man’s pockets.  

Beyond Moran and Wilmot, the cast is just as impressive. Chris O’Dowd ratchets up the creepy factor as a faux genial butcher-cuckold, unworried by his leering wife’s adultery. Aiden Gillen turns in his usual schtick: whispery, rude, quietly hateful. His black-hearted doctor is perhaps the film’s most disturbing presence, an abrasively cruel Beckettian observer seeking little beyond his own instant gratification. 

Obversely, Kelly Reilly serves a different purpose as Lavelle’s fragile, self-scarred daughter, the residue of a life before his vocation, a time marked by alcohol and violence. Even with her own demons, spawned, perhaps, by her father’s path, she represents something real, normal and, worst of all, certain to depart.

Such melancholy persists until the closing credits as the destructive power of corrupted innocence strikes a note of true sadness. The Guard was coming, undeniably, from a place of broad comedy, albeit in varying shades of darkness. Calvary, on the other hand, takes aim at something more visceral, namely the ailing spiritual wellbeing of a nation struggling to reconcile religion and fact. 

Fascinatingly brave, McDonagh’s commentary is likely to affect some more than others. The fury lying beneath, however, is tangible and real enough to taste, no matter the name or face of one’s God. 

An edited version of this article was first published here. 

Luis Suarez: the only option.

My new article over on opinionfootball.com

PFA Player of the Year: The only option

'Suarez is that rarest of beasts. Rising from the same ground as Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo or Zlatan Ibrahimovic, he is an artist blessed not only with the game’s most prized ability, but with the prodigious gifts to exist above and beyond the rest of an already gilded plane.'

Check it out here. 

Game of Thrones, season four, episode one

If there exists, somewhere, an ounce of Game of Thrones fatigue, there was no evidence of it on Thursday evening. A collection of hardy fans queued patiently on a bitterly cold March evening, waiting for admittance to the Movie House, Dublin Road, and the first night of the the Belfast Film Festival. Winter was coming.

In securing a prized preview of the newest episode of HBO’s fantasy drama, the Festival has pulled off something of a coup. Yet it is a testament also to the central role currently occupied by the American cable giant in the development of Northern Ireland as an important hub for film and television. Game of Thrones is a bona fide juggernaut and its ongoing production in the region speaks to the success it has so far enjoyed during its four-year stay. 

By extension, the Belfast Film Festival sits as the creative showpiece in an increasingly relevant filmmaking landscape. It also flies the flag for a city keen to establish itself as a producer of high-end output — both foreign and domestic — and one which is home to a bustling, diverse artistic sector. HBO has long enjoyed a reputation as a purveyor of material rich in appeal from both a commercial and innovative standpoint. That it should contribute to the Festival’s slate is a bonus for the many local Thrones fans who take great pride in Northern Ireland’s contribution to this realisation of A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin’s towering literary saga. 

With series regular Ian McElhinney in attendance, the organisers were good enough to put on two separate screenings of season four’s opening instalment, Two Swords. Of the 7000 hopeful applicants, 500 lucky, excited souls were on hand for a sneak peek some two weeks before the rest of the world gets to join in. 

Picking up, roughly, at the halfway point of Martin’s third volume, A Storm of Swords, Thursday evening’s delights began with the calculating Tywin Lannister (an always brilliant Charles Dance) destroying the great sword of Sean Bean’s late, tragic Ned Stark. In melting it down to forge two new blades he is essentially usurping the Starks’ proud heritage. By tossing its wolfskin scabbard into the furnace, he finally dismisses the threat so chillingly snuffed out in season three. 

For a show big on statements, it is a considered and nuanced opening sequence. It suggests, now more than ever, that showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are confident custodians of HBO’s most valuable asset. Indeed, Game of Thrones occupies a curious place in the zeitgeist. A series of peerless majesty, it straddles the divide between screens large and small. It may be beamed into living rooms on a weekly basis but the content is undeniably cinematic in nature. Its arrival on the large screen may be unfamiliar but the novelty is, nonetheless, entirely fitting given the spectacular, arch fantasy at its core. 

From the moment that Emilia Clarke and her dragons appear, one is struck by the ease with which it all translates to the scale of a movie theatre. As the messianic, quietly ruthless Daenerys Targaryen, Clarke has grown into the role with each passing year. Alongside McElhinney’s stoic Barristan Selmy, the ‘Mother of Dragons’ occupies one of the sprawling tale’s more compellingly fantastical arcs. 

Equally thrilling is the introduction of fan favourite Oberyn Martell, the hot-tempered, hypersexual nobleman intent on seeking revenge for a murdered sister. Pedro Pascal carries, with ease, Martell’s potent brew of charm, cunning and menace. His crackling interplay with star turn Peter Dinklage offers a delicious hint of what is to come. As he slides through his debut like liquid mercury, the casting represents another inspired choice by the Benioff-Weiss think tank.

Game of Thrones is now running on all cylinders though it has not completely abandoned the notion of attracting new viewers. On more than one occasion, the usually taut dialogue slips into exposition at the expense of the story. It is not a burden to relive the myriad events leading up to this point but the more it happens, the more it jars. With any luck, this need to rake over the past will have dissipated by the time season four truly breaks out.

As ever, much is packed into the 50 minute running time and the final scenes featuring Sandor Clegane (Rory McCann) and Maisie Williams’s Arya Stark ably captures all that makes Thrones great. Funny and foul-mouthed, violent and visceral, the duo’s encounter with a band of murderous marauders is a classic summation of the jagged alliances and lust for vengeance that have always defined the show. The final corruption of Arya is met not as tragedy but as triumph. It is in these contradictions that the real strengths lie. 

For the Belfast Film Festival, its association with HBO is an impressive start, an admirable response to obvious public appetites. As a means of getting people through the door and excited for the rest of the programme, it is a fairly inspired choice. Long may it continue. 

An edited version of this article was first published here. 

Starred Up

The beginning and end of Starred Up, David Mackenzie’s brutally frank prison drama, take place within the confines of the film’s nameless penitentiary. The world outside the walls may as well be the Moon for all the relevance it has to any of the proceedings within them. Revisiting the spare immediacy of Hallam Foe and Young Adam — and aping, in style, if not narrative, Jacques Audiard’s startlingly realistic A Prophet —  Mackenzie’s powerful depiction of the British penal jungle is a claustrophobic meditation on the collapse of social conventions and controls. 

Opening with the invasive inspection of stoic, newly arrived 19-year-old inmate Eric Love — ‘starred up’ from a young offenders’ institution — events are set against the drearily evocative backdrops of Belfast’s Crumlin Road Gaol and Lisburn’s Maze prison. Forget the tabloid tales of comfortable sofas and Sky Sports, Love’s new home is cramped, desolate and utterly horrifying. Indeed, it is somewhat fitting that Northern Ireland, a place not unfamiliar with the concept of Her Majesty’s pleasure, should be able to provide locations as truly desperate as these. This is not the gothic cathedral of Stephen King’s Shawshank, nor is it imbued with the mellow, familial elegance of his green mile. If Eric wasn’t mad going in, it is likely he would emerge a lesser man.

Eric is sane, of course, but he is not exactly well adjusted. A product of the system, and a longtime ward of the state, his crimes are many, his senses honed, even at his relatively young age, to an almost perfect degree. His first action upon earning a moment’s privacy is to fashion a shank from a razor blade and a toothbrush, a coldly efficient use of time and materials. Within hours of arriving he has accidentally beaten a fellow prisoner senseless, induced a riot and bitten a guard’s penis. It is a hectic opening, though, given the obvious savagery of Eric and his jailers, not entirely surprising. 

In the lead role, Jack O’Connell excels, reducing his murderous ring leader of 2008’s terrifying Eden Lake to little more than a petulant lout. Featured already this month in the deliciously overblown 300 sequel, his performance here is undoubtedly one of searing authenticity. It marks him out as an up-and-comer of genuine talent. Eric is, with the best will in the world, set to spend much of his life inside and O’Connell is careful not to play him as someone with any plans beyond the next meal. Incarceration is his reality, his touchstone and, in spite of the efforts of some of those around him, he has few designs on anything else. Significantly, the reasons for his being locked away are never articulated. Like all that exists beyond the horizon of high concrete walls, they are irrelevant. 

With the aid, however, of Rupert Friend’s tutor, Oliver, Eric slowly comes out of his shell. He learns to offer gratitude, practise self-control, conciliate; he even gains a tea mug with his name on it. These are small steps on the road, not to redemption, but to survival. 

Friend is particularly fascinating. A hazily-motivated civilian counsellor who hints at significant personal baggage, he may leave at any moment but clearly seeks, and finds, solace in this grim edifice of HMP Wherever. He is the one calming figure in an unsteady environment where dangerous men live on top of each other, where jailhouse flunkies are used for very specific purposes — mobile phones can fit into many small spaces it seems — and where sexual proclivities are born of necessity: “It’s fuckin prison innit?”

In the midst of all the grime rests a surprisingly tender family tale. Glum Australian character actor, Ben Mendelsohn, is a seriously gifted performer and, as prison enforcer Nev Love, he turns in a brilliantly layered portrayal. 

As it happens he is also Eric’s wayward father, torn between keeping the population in line, at the behest of his sinister benefactor (Peter Ferdinando), and providing some level of foul-mouthed guidance to his defiant offspring. Nev’s is a contorted moral code and sure, the circumstances of the reunion may be far from ideal, but, in his quieter moments, he is solid in the conviction that his son’s best interests are of foremost concern. 

It is unfortunate that the bravery on show comes under threat from the kind of overheated, underdeveloped mawkishness that defines the final twenty minutes. Quite why Mackenzie decided to follow this route is confusing considering the atmosphere of vicious realism in which his picture ultimately thrives. The tenderness of the finale is far more apt, a suggestion that simple contact is as essential to humanity as the need to endure. 

An edited version of this article was first published here. 

The Grand Budapest Hotel

There are few auteurs in cinema more distinctive than Wes Anderson, the quietly confident Texan whose films have proved a subtly dazzling antidote to Hollywood's penchant for rote excess. He is everything that mass audiences are supposed to dislike: curiously whimsical, slightly off-kilter -- the anti-Michael Bay if you will.

Yet, he continues to produce work of a superlative standard, occupying that restlessly idiosyncratic corner of American cinema populated by kindred spirits such as Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry. With his eighth feature, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson once again strikes out in a new direction. He brings with him, however, the visual tropes and narrative flourishes that have defined him since his superbly left field debut Bottle Rocket. 

Precisely how Anderson divines his ideas is known only to him. They are the products, obviously, of a keenly creative mind and The Grand Budapest Hotel shows Anderson in full flight. This is lively and imaginative, confident and controlled. It is quite brilliant. 

Dispense with the need for an easily accessible plot and Anderson's films becomes infinitely rewarding. He is not one to deal in obscure or abstract art house fare — The Royal Tenenbaums was, ultimately, a recognisable tale of family dysfunction — but his output can be an acquired taste. Indeed taste, perhaps above all else, is an essential element here, sometimes good, sometimes horrible, never unseen. 

Opening, for no apparent reason, with a young girl reading alone in the shadow of a bust dedicated to a man known only as ‘the Author’, the setting is as gratuitous as it is vivid: a snowy Soviet park handily dressed with a trio of singing elders. The next stage shows the Author (Tom Wilkinson) introducing the volume in the girl’s possession, namely his book about the eponymous old hostelry. In typical Anderson style his second intro is populated with charming irrelevancies: a mischievous child with a pop gun; Wilkinson’s narration presented as a bulletin-like piece to camera. From the beginning the director’s confidence is almost tangible. 

This is a picture of multiple layers, peeled repeatedly in its initial stages to open up fresh angles and lines to follow. The succeeding sequence sees the Author’s younger self — an amusingly upright Jude Law — holidaying in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka. His lodging of choice is the draughty, ‘enchanting old ruin’ of the title, replete with faded grandeur and equally weathered kitsch. The Author, in turn, learns of the hotel’s lively history from its urbane owner, Zero Moustafa (the ever impressive F. Murray Abraham).

As the chronology shifts once more, Zero is re-introduced as Tony Revolori’s lowly lobby boy at the luxurious Grand Budapest Hotel. It is a place of class and discretion, ruled over by his mentor, and elegant chief concierge, Monsieur Gustave. As Gustave, Ralph Fiennes is a whirlwind of precise manners, boundless avarice and preening self-regard. It is a hilarious depiction of a truly original character and Fiennes luxuriates in every last word of his refined, expletive-marked dialogue. Given his largely austere résumé, it is easy to forget Fiennes’s facility for comedy and, unfortunately for the rest of the cast, he leaves little room for anyone else.

That is not to suggest any struggles from his fellow players. Newcomer Revolori is more than a match for Fiennes, his deadpan delivery bouncing nicely off the veteran’s biting one-liners and withering verbosity. Jeff Goldblum shines as a steady attorney, the only sane person in a hilariously unhinged plot. Adrien Brody and Willem Dafoe stand out also as scumbags for the ages, the former a raven-haired manchild, the latter his creepy fixer. Even Anderson regulars Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman pop up too, sporting ridiculous beards and strange haircuts. By the time Harvey Keitel appears as a bald convict, it is clear that this was a project on which serious talent was jostling for work. 

That said, not everyone slots in seamlessly. Edward Norton, normally so watchable, is inexplicably uncomfortable. Saoirse Ronan, herself no stranger to acting excellence, seems to have missed the joke altogether. 

The labyrinthine plot borders on indulgent, though, mercifully, it is never dull. As Gustave, Zero and the rest tear around Mitteleuropa in pursuit of the key to a wealthy heiress’s fortune (one of the suave concierge’s many aged lovers), the story and repartee retain a relentless cadence.

As ever, longtime collaborator Robert Yeoman ably captures Anderson’s lushly coloured, Thirties vision. By contrast, his early frames are filled with the sort of folksy, staid quirkiness for which Anderson is known. The energetic camera soaks in the Grand Budapest’s rich palette with as much efficiency as it invigorates the idyllic alpine splendour of its location. From time to time, the duo reach back into the annals of early 20th century European animation, putting to use tiny moving silhouettes and delicate cardboard funiculars. These are mere quaint trappings, of course, but they undoubtedly complement the depths of the experience.

As a piece of pure storytelling, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a fantastically enjoyable yarn and Anderson, working from his own script as before, instills it with his usual sense of relaxed, dysfunctional farce. For those wishing to invest in it, there await rewards aplenty. 

An edited version of this article was first published here.