the quintessential Anderson contrivance, and as unsatisfying as the luridly-coloured, insubstantial confections his characters are so addicted to.

Rating: 2/10 (20 December 2016)

I give this Wes Anderson movie a '2' simply for the fascinating oddity of its comic-book style. Come to think of it, he might as well have made an animated feature, for all the reality you'll ever see in this toy-theatre of a show.
Anderson has made pretentious claims to being inspired by the writings of Stephen Zweig. This is giving hostage to fortune, because when I investigated the nature of this influence, I found it explained precisely why this film is the quintessential Anderson contrivance, and as unsatisfying as the luridly-coloured, insubstantial confections his characters are so addicted to.
Michael Hofmann, writing in the 28th January 2010 edition of the London Review of Books, has the following choice comments about Anderson's literary hero, which serve to tell us a lot about the film maker's taste:
'Hofmannsthal's friend Leopold von Andrian put himself through a Zweig novella . . . 'reluctantly, a spoonful a day, like a nasty-tasting medicine', and, in the course of a comprehensive, paragraph-long taking-apart, wrote: 'each sentence incredibly pretentious, false and empty – the whole thing a complete void'.'
'. . . there is an unusual consensus here – Mann, Musil, Brecht, Hesse, Canetti, Hofmannsthal, Kraus – to the effect that Stefan Zweig was a purveyor of Trivialliteratur and, save in commercial terms, an utterly negligible figure.'
'Zweig himself speaks a little smugly in his autobiography, The World of Yesterday, of 'this preference of mine for intense, intemperate characters in my novels and novellas'. 'The typical Zweig story,' the critic William Deresiewicz notes, cooling to his subject in an afterword, 'is a tale of monomaniacal passion set loose amid the veiled, upholstered civility of the Austrian bourgeoisie, the class into which Zweig was born.' '
'Zweig is both an absolutely natural and an absolutely dreadful writer; the one quality of course does not preclude the other.'
Indeed. Anderson has great technical facility, and the films he cranks out are like meticulous clockwork complications that are the be-all and the end-all of the exercise. But we don't go to the cinema to see a clockwork doll. We go to expand our sense of humanity. Anderson has, with 'The Grand Budapest Hotel,' produced something that is certainly the masterpiece of his airless, unreal personal fantasy.
His cutely contrived models are manipulated with obsessive skill, and animated with all the hyperactive energy of automata. Any stray reflection of adult or real existence is instantly trivialised, and drained of all life by the manic mimetic puppetry of a creation that is trapped in the primitive ethos of childhood's purely sensory and dynamic distractions. How Anderson's embarrassingly immature entertainments have ever been credited with the status of artistry is beyond me. He's like a teenager still fixated by an infantile world he is unwilling or unable to put away. His inappropriately prolonged innocence is not charming - it is embarrassing. It is a kind of decadence. It is perhaps honest insofar as it is a true reflection of the profoundly infantile nature of most North American culture.
This is play as self-indulgence, not as wit or irony. It is the world seen at the level of the rug-rat, with a prospect of weird multi-coloured toys scattered in improbable relations by the drifting inconsequence of free-wheeling fantasy. It is a world that charms similarly immature and adolescent sensibilities, but repels those with more grown-up tastes.