"Pardon me, boy, is this the Ruritania station?"

Rating: 9/10 (1 November 2014)

This shaggy-dachshund story from Wes Anderson, set in a fictional mountain realm between the World Wars, has a lot going for it, even though it lacks the emotional resonance of Anderson's near-perfect "Moonrise Kingdom." I doubt that anyone was eagerly awaiting this obsessive re-creation of the lost world of the Austro-Hungarian empire, as mirrored in the works of Stefan Zweig (who gets a writing credit), but here it is, all the same.
The caper plot involving a fussy hotel concierge turned action hero and his wide- eyed sidekick is a total hoot; all the Anderson trademarks are on display-the exquisite dollhouse sets and gorgeous cinematography, the jokey little signs (the local newspaper is "The Transalpine Yodel") and sly sight gags (a prison guard probes food parcels with a bayonet, doesn't have the heart to impale a bag of delicate pastries).
Ralph Fiennes as "the legendary concierge M. Gustave" carries the movie, supported by the usual Anderson familiars plus cameos by the likes of Saoirse Ronan and Léa Seydoux; especially good work by Willem Dafoe as a lycanthropic hit-man. It's an impressive achievement, within its self-imposed limitations, but it's surprising that, with so much attention paid to the technical side of things, the script seems a little slack at times (didn't anybody who read it know the difference between "vouched for" and "vouchsafed"?), and I'm not sure that an emo guy like Zweig, author of "Letter from an Unknown Woman," would have liked to be remembered for such a bloodless and contrived cinematic pastiche.