Frivolous and visually astounding, fun and funny and still restrained

Rating: 7/10 (7 June 2014)

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Stunning at every turn, and yet...well...it lacks something, too, that left me happy but unsatisfied.
As usual with a Wes Anderson movie, the amazing sets and set design win the day. Sometimes this combines with a little magic in a movie to lift the result up beautifully, as in "Moonrise Kingdom" (which I loved). Here there are certainly moments that work but many others that simply reside. The main character played by Ralph Fiennes is wonderfully proper and funny.
Plot? A forced fairy tale of a story keeps the narration moving through several distinct parts, but the main idea is that an old man is explaining to a younger patron of the dying hotel how he came to own it. And those events happened to him as a bellboy back when the hotel was truly grand. The fact this is narrated is part of the package, but it keeps everything at that distance Anderson prefers.
What it lacks oddly is magic, the one thing a fairy tale like this demands. There are lots of deliberate (and good) clichés at work—a stolen painting, a mysterious patron, an unexplained death—and there is the scene itself, this glorious old hotel both in its seedy later years and in its heyday. And though there are delights, and witty lines, at every turn, there is a feeling of just watching it, never quite getting involved. Maybe that's deliberate, but if so, it still left me a bit restless at times.
What about all the stars in this overpacked cast? Well, you can tell they are in it for the pleasure of it, taking on comic book kinds of roles. But there is a disappointment there, too, because too often it seems that each star appears for their own sake, and her or his fame, not for the edge it gives their character. The most obvious case is Bill Murray, who appears in a dull role for all of about 20 seconds of screen time. At the other extreme is Willem Defoe, who is delectably evil all through in his major role. Jude Law makes a decent foil (listener) to the narrator, played well enough by F. Murray Abraham, but both men never shine. They sit and talk, after all.
And so it goes. Which takes us back to the sets. Wow. Unbelievable at every turn. The hotel is superb, and likewise the expansive mansion of the murdered woman, and likewise even the train car which appears more than once. It's a wonderfully made movie on all these technical levels, including some flashy, tricky photography that is playful in its wide and then close views. See it? Sure, if you are predisposed. There no hating this movie, for sure. Which is high praise.