Hailing Mary (and Wes Anderson)

Over the past weekend, I watched two movies that made a strong visual impression on me. At a massive local cineplex, I saw Hollywood’s very welcome new Netflix blockbuster, Project Hail Mary. At home on my couch, I enjoyed re-watching what is probably Wes Anderson’s most significant film, 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

 Project Hail Mary was of great interest to me both because there are several engineers (and an engineer-to-be) in my life and because many of my current screenwriting students—a group with a wide range of aesthetic tastes—are enthusiastic about this film. I have not read the novel on which the film is based, and I admit that the scientific (and pseudo-scientific) aspects of the plot leave me completely boggled. But it boasts a bravura solo performance by Ryan Gosling as a reluctant astronaut stuck in space, as well as an eclectic score I often found enchanting. Beyond this, Project Hail Mary enjoys the advantage of a wonderful visual sense. Even when I had no idea what was going on, I enjoyed basking in the glow of the film’s otherworldly cinematography.

 Project Hail Mary is, of course, very much about the future: about a possible grave danger to our solar system, about the exotic inter-terrestrial discoveries that may save us all, and about the non-human being with whom our hero allies in the course of his eventful mission. By contrast, The Grand Budapest Hotel devotes itself to the past. In a story that is probably Anderson’s most ambitious ever, we move between several different twentieth-century eras. The film starts in 1985, with the visit of a  young woman to a snowy European cemetery. There, holding a thick book titled The Grand Budapest Hotel, she pauses at the shrine of the book’s once-famous author. We then flash back to the author’s 1968 visit to the sadly-faded hotel, where he hears the story of its origins from its now-aged current proprietor. This whisks us back to 1932, the heyday of this majestic structure set among Alpine crags and reached by a charming funicular. The 1932 version of the hotel—with its celebrity guests and suave omnipresent concierge (a delightfully debonair  Ralph Fiennes)—looks like a huge pink wedding cake, complete with Roman baths and every other amenity man can devise.

 But nothing can outlast the onward rush of history, and we see for ourselves how manners and mores change over time. World War II of course takes its toll, as do other more personal tragedies, and the glamour of the 1930s gives way to Soviet-style utilitarianism and even further indignities. (We gather that as of 1985 this grand hotel is gone for good.) What makes the film so fascinating is Wes Anderson’s unforgettable flair for non-realistic visuals. The exterior of the hotel as we see it looks very much like an elaborate dollhouse, and the staging of the film’s actors  (many of them celebrated Anderson veterans) emphasizes their unreality too. While  Project Hail Mary makes the far corners of Outer Space look thrillingly real, The Grand Budapest Hotel ensures that all of its people and all of its places look like artifice. Which has a certain undeniable logic. When we think of the past—even just one or two generations back—it often turns into a candy-coated fantasyland. And Wes Anderson is just the writer-director to convert Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Saiorse Ronan, Jeff Goldblum, and Bill Murray (among others) into living paper dolls. Which leaves me wondering: how would Anderson, with his acute visual sense, handle a movie set in outer space?