Any fool can play a tragedy

Ralph Fiennes in 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'

Ralph Fiennes, Saorsie Ronan and Tony Revolori in ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ (2014)

Occasionally when you do stand-up comedy competitions, you’ll see someone performing who is very obviously an actor.

You note them by their slightly fussy stage presence and lack of jokes. Sometimes they’ll have a half-decent comic idea, but they’ll overplay it, ham it up too much, forget a basic rule of comedy performance: You’ve got to go fast. That idea which seemed so amusing and original is good for a few seconds of material at best, and now you’re up there with another three minutes to fill. And up on stage three minutes is a long time.

This is the key difference between being a actor playing comedy and a funny person doing so – actors do too much. They put a trill on a punchline, or do a fussy accent in the set-up, and forget that the utilitarian task of the comedian is to steer the audience towards a laugh. The aim is to land the joke, and nothing about your performance should be distracting from that; it’s just a matter of trying to secure that laugh. The laugh is your oxygen. A chuckle is not a bonus for your overall excellence; you need it to survive. Ironically, this means that comedians are often better at giving dramatic performances than straight actors are at funny ones, as they’re used to a certain necessary self-effacement in performance; if a comedian is told ‘We need this’, they work out how to get there.

There’s a great recent exception to the idea of ‘Actors can’t play comedy’; Ralph Fiennes as Gustave H. in ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ (2014). For I put it to you today that that’s the best comic performance by anyone this century, at least in the English-speaking cinema.

Now obviously Fiennes has shown his comic chops before, as the repulsive and satyrlike Harry Hawkes in ‘A Bigger Splash’, or as just Harry in ‘In Bruges’, really funny supporting roles. Yet in ‘Grand Budapest’ he runs the show and makes the picture, indeed elevates the whole proceedings into a better or at least the most itself version of itself.

First of all, consistent with my opening argument, Fiennes plays it fast. There’s no milking of jokes, just delivery of them at a clipped and clear pitch. If you do that with jokes, sort of rattle them away, it creates an atmosphere of comic abundance, that there’ll always be another gag coming along. Indeed, Fiennes is constantly dashing around over the film’s 99 minutes - nine too many for a comedy, but we’ll allow it - as if he has wings on his heels; his manic pacing seems to set the tone for the film as awhile. He also establishes his character quickly and with quick deliveries; he’s a bon viveur, bisexual, slippery and essentially kind-hearted. We get all this in just a few rat-a-tat lines of dialogue, and nothing about how they’re putted over has fuss or flair.

It’s a great performance, and Fiennes never attempts to add a moment of psychological realism to it; the sadness, the pathos of his character, is generated at pace and melan-comically too. When you talk to actors, they always tell you to play the truth of comedy, but in fact in comedy, even the truth needs to be played as comic, as in the comic view of the world the truth is often so awful as to need a good laughing at.

Physically it’s an amusing turn too, with Fiennes moving the whole time, in a big comic stride (Fiennes is 5”11, not tiny, not giant) and simple cleanly-cut costumes; he’s funny in the way he doesn’t modulate his grandiose airs even in his prison clothes. He serves as a kind of human metronome within the film, and the performance is so strong that his performance, better than any other Anderson films, regulates the supporting cast, keeping the film itself as buoyant and fluffy as the film’s recurrent pastries. No-one else in the film is as funny as him, but that funniness brings a centrifugal order to the other turns, like he’s a large celestial body to those smaller stars.

He also puts the punchlines in the right place. We’ve got no doubt as to an audience as to where we supposed to laugh, and any hint of psychological realism, Joaquin Phoenix-esque naturalistic mumbling, is pretty damn fatal for that. The difference here is that the jokes themselves – like my personal favourite of Fiennes saying prison tough Pinky Bandinski has ‘actually become a dear friend’ – serve to build the character. But Fiennes plays them as jokes first and foremost, content to pitch on the same way as a great sitcom performance and without the self-consciousness of an actor ‘doing comedy now’. He doesn’t ‘disappear into the role’; he retains exactly the right ironized, arch distance of a comic performer, careful to never overcomplicate a ‘type’ entirely out of the comic. There is pathos to Gustav, but it’s above all the pathos of the European high culture he represents disappearing, a culture for which he serves as an avatar.

For like any great comic performance it terminates in a moment of sadness, of the comedy – and comedy is a great life force, indicative of a lust for human experience – being stopped. Fiennes’ frenetic movement seems in some way the whole time to be trying to outrun his being collared by the Nazis in all their lumpen literalness, and deftly we don’t see some big dramatic moment of his final confrontation with the Nazis; just his typical verbal wit failing to work to placate them. It places the Nazis, who don’t forget they were a group who prided themselves on mass-murdering some of the world’s funniest people, as the enemies of comedy, irreverence and wit. To the extent the heady souffle of Grand Budapest has an idea, it’s that loss of pre-war the worldly ironies of pre-war Europe, and the film thematizes it beautifully via Gustav and his fate.

I have more reservations about the whole film itself, which I feel needed a few more big dumb comic moments, a few more big non-verbal laughs. This is how I often feel about Anderson’s work, that he missed that even the most verbally sophisticated comedies function best with a side portion of baser wit (Withnail and I’s ‘child’s piss’ urine sample comes to mind). It can’t all be Lubitsch.

But I have no such qualms about Fiennes’ turn. He got everything out of that script and created a comic spine to it that other Anderson films do not match. Fiennes has the whole film turned tight like a watch and is forcing everyone else to play to his rhythm and pace, with a brisk instruction of ‘no self-indulgence, dear friends, we’re doing comedy.’ In an exceptionally rare quality from an established tragedian, he provides a performance which is not taking itself too seriously, only the craft of comedy.

It all leaves me longing to write for the man. I spent my thirties trying and failing to get scripts produced in London. I have seven full-length plays on my hard drive, all of which have at least ten great lines. One big name to any of those scripts would probably see the lot get produced.

So if you’re listening Ralph, let’s do something. I love you as Gustav. I love your Harrys. I will overlook the way you treated that steward on that airplane and admire your decision not to procreate. You could be the greatest English comic actor since Leonard Rossiter, who at times your voice, perhaps deliberately, recalls. Do drop me an email, and let’s get to work on something together. We could, as your precious and perhaps even immortal Gustav might say, become dear, dear friends.