I'll try and lead with an opening question here: Do you think Bill Murray's smaller role in the movie changed the feeling from other Wes Anderson films where he usually plays a more notable character?
I didn't mind. It was nice to see Anderson working with other actors. Anderson seems to set his movies up as stories within a story, or a story relayed third-hand by one narrator or another. Murray's character was interesting to me because he was the emissary of a somewhat shadowy group within the story of the story being told by Jude Law's/Tom Wilkinson's character. I guess for me, that fits in with the whole, "this story is being told to you by someone who heard it from someone else" in that in those second or third-hand narratives, more detail may be desired by the listener, but is ultimately unavailable because the person retelling the story does not know themselves. It just reminds me that it's so hard to know what is true and what may as well be fiction when we hear stories in this fashion.
Good point. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a retelling of events where the author is recounting his experience with Zero, which is within the book that the person at the beginning (and end) of the movie is reading. It's at the least a third-hand narrative, which could explain a couple of things I noticed: the first being that older zero and younger zero look almost nothing alike, and the second being that the hotel lobby in the story is much much larger and grander than that of the lobby when he's recounting his story to the author. It could be that a lot of other things in this movie aren't exactly as they seem either. I wanted to expand on this just a bit to say that the above could be a play towards how we view events past, and the effects of putting on "rose-tinted" glasses when discussing the past. It could also question the reliability of the narrative as a whole.
Yeah. It's becoming more and more apparent scientifically that memory is unreliable (a surprise to no one). I've noticed that in certain groups of friends, certain events (legendary only to us) have taken on their own kind of mythology as time has gone on. I'm not saying this is an original observation or anything, just that I'm starting to understand how much narrative and memory alter history, even personal histories and that it's something that everyone does to one degree or another.
I think Wes Anderson is able to do an interesting thing with his actors, he renders them as simultaneously bludgeoning agents of particular worldviews, but also allows them to be completely unique forces of their own. Murray typically is a sardonic, flat-affected individual with odd motivations when he is more of the focus, but otherwise he is present in all of Anderson's films, even if just to be there. I think this indicates more of the bottom line of Anderson's films: Style above all else. Murray needs to be in it because 1) this is a Wes Anderson film and 2) Bill Murray is amongst the things required for an Anderson film to retain the over-arching aesthetics he demands from his work
I appreciated the focus never settling for too long on either Jason Schwartzman or Bill Murray, and I think Ralph Fiennes made the entire movie for me. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I love Fiennes' acting or his dialog more, I guess one complemented the other.