Idiosyncratic, Endearing and Clever, It's Anderson Through-and-Through

Rating: 8/10 (5 June 2014)

At this point I think we're pretty well beyond hope that Wes Anderson will ever try a different style of filmmaking, and for that I wish more power to him. Even the stop-motion children's film The Fantastic Mr. Fox, despite its literary origins, is indisputably Anderson from start to finish. So, in lieu of a proper evolution, perhaps the best one can hope for is for Mr. Anderson to make the perfect Wes Anderson movie. The Grand Budapest Hotel falls quite close to that ideal. Thoroughly quirky, lovingly composed with a strict eye for heavy detail, funny and dense and sweet and genuine; it's everything I love about his pictures, draped over the skeleton of a different tale. The man certainly has his favorites - recurring actors from earlier in his career appear in the dozens throughout this one - but you'll smile and applaud their arrival, one by one, like traveling players in a variety of elaborate costumes and characters. Ralph Fiennes is magnificent as the leading man, a silky-smooth, primped, proper, profane concierge with a knack for elderly women and a ferocious wit. His understudy, lobby boy Anthony Quinonez, is the film's anchor: a particularly straight, self-assured young lead who's cut from the same cloth as Rushmore's Max Fischer. Richly funny, otherworldy in its beauty, quick and sharp as a tack, it goes a bit overboard in the third act but that's all in the name of good fun.