Recursive Self-Spoofery

Rating: 6/10 (13 October 2014)

This movie is a visually stunning scenario that never becomes a story worth hearing. The literary artifices of nesting narrations and the picture-book-like montages are not garnishes on a sumptuous plot, but just morsels plotted into a course of snacks that never makes a meal.
This hodgepodge results from the assemblers' (Anderson et al.'s) desire to assemble plot-components into a movie scenario--the consequence of absence of desire to tell a story the writers feel, with any passion whatsoever, compelled to tell.
Because the writers know we'll know they're recycling leitmotifs of the sexually frustrated dowager, petty infighting among inheritors, homoeroticism, etc., and motifs of archetypal fascism and Nazism, etc., to keep it from becoming totally insipid, they resort to spoofing their own story even as they're telling it. But rather than cleverly crafted comic relief in the midst of what admittedly is elegance of style and diction--rather than match that elegance--the spoofery is just vulgar. The jar of that vulgarity might make you laugh, until you realize, if this is irony, it's just not that funny, and it doesn't seem to be for the sake of anything other than self-spoofery. Hell, the movie doesn't even attain campiness. At times it gives you the sense of being told, "Oops, you caught us tinkering with leitmotifs and primal archetypes; we'll have to poke fun at ourselves to hide our triteness and banality as story-crafter hacks." The story is not told from the heart, or if it is, the writer'(s) heart is in the wrong place.
Tony Revolori as the lobby boy "Zero" is of course the movie's saving grace, and gracefully and sweetly does he play his rôle.
Conclusive Ranking: Splendiferousness of set design and conception à la the best children's illustrated books (probably all the more appreciable under the influence of psychotropics or hallucinogens) – 10; Tony Revolori as Zero – 10; Primal archetype capturing – 8; Character development – 4; Plot – 3; Passion – 0; Six criteria total score – 35; Overall rating – 5.8