IMDb #185 Review: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Source: Wikipedia

Acclaimed auteur Wes Anderson cooks up a blindingly colorful tragicomedy, by packing it with rectangles and spectacular cinematography that even a movie dunce such as yours truly can detect.

Generations ago, in our story-within-a-story-within-a-story, a naive pencil-mustached lobby boy receives tutelage from the staggeringly overqualified concierge of the titular hotel. In their Europe, fictional countries blend with real ones, just as bizarrely beautiful contrivances mingle freely with pitch-black comedy and brutal realism, sweetening but never sugarcoating.

The concierge enjoys amorous affairs with wealthy old ladies. Until one paramour's timely death pits him against her awful family of cartoon villains. He and the lobby boy embark on a quest to find the hidden will and save a priceless painting. Together the characters spend a disproportionate amount of time away from the titular hotel. Meanwhile, their fictional European nation undergoes a coup, which floods the train systems with humorless men with machine guns and itchy trigger fingers.

The pace swishes along at a crisp, brisk trot. Manic antics are executed with deadpan flair. The sets scintillate with symmetry and dazzling architecture; even the detention facility is picturesque. Obscenities fly in the rapid-fire, wit-charged dialogues.

If the blunt humor and dizzying speed don't put you off, there's a brilliant story in there somewhere. An unconventional romance, an eloquent comedy, a completely unexpected suspenseful thriller. Which makes it even more soul-crushing when bleak reality ensues and that delightful world evaporates and the hotel becomes the drab ruin you knew it would become all along because you paid attention in the beginning.

100 minutes.