Movie Review: The Grand Budapest Hotel

4 stars out of 5

You know I’m a big Wes Anderson fan, right? Since I’ve been ranking movies on here, The Fantastic Mr. Fox was my No. 5 film of 2009, and I thought Moonrise Kingdom was 2012’s best movie. Oh, and Rushmore is one of my all-time favorites. So let’s say that I go into a Wes Anderson movie with high expectations.

The Grand Budapest Hotel did not let me down.

It probably helped a little bit that I have a great fondness for hotels. (So does Wes, apparently, having previously made the short film Hotel Chevalier based on characters from The Darjeeling Limited.) I come from hotel people on my dad’s side. You can see a sign for my family’s Heiden Hotel in Ang Lee’s 2009 period piece Taking Woodstock, and back in 1987, my cousin Steve actually made his own hotel movie at the Heiden. So I know a thing or two about hotels’ glory days and slow declines.

Wait, what was I writing about? Oh yeah, The Grand Budapest. This is vintage Anderson. Is he getting better and better as a filmmaker? Perhaps! Angles, lighting, timing—perfection. There is hilarious comedy—even madcap—but he never crosses the line into silliness. He once again creates a world that is simultaneously 100% real yet 100% unreal—and not at all repeating universes from his earlier films. There is so much to marvel at here, and often a sense of wonderment.

Yes, the gang’s all here: Schwartzman and Murray and Goldblum and Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody and Edward Norton. Plus Jude Law (eh) and F. Murray Abraham (solid) and Harvey Keitel (funny) and Willem Dafoe (menacing and funny) and Tilda Swinton (wonderful as an old lady) and Tom Wilkinson and Bob Balaban and Fisher Stevens and the Diving Bell and the Butterfly guy and Saoirse Ronan as the latest Wes Anderson film supercrush (with Léa Seydoux coming in second).

Hey I forgot the leads! Ralph Fiennes is very, very good as the concierge, an expertly crafted character who is consistently very funny. Is Tony Revolori a revol-ation as Fiennes’ lobby-boy sidekick Zero? He does good work here—often very good—but I couldn’t help thinking of him as poor man’s Jason Schwartzman. (A younger, Middle Eastern Jason Schwartzman.)

If anything is lacking from The Grand Budapest Hotel, I’d say it’s the underlying heart and emotional oomph that really pushed Moonrise Kingdom to a whole new level for Anderson, in my humble opinion. He tries to get there again, and there are hints, but for me it didn’t quite happen. Maybe all the wacky, very clever comedy got in the way. If so, no complaints here.