Review: Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel"

It's safe to assume that any filmmaker with a recognizable stamp on their work is going to have both avid fans who connect with the way they tell stories and vehement detractors who don't. For Wes Anderson, the man behind Moonrise Kingdom, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Rushmore, each new film seems to widen that gap between the extremes, and it's easy to understand why. As someone who enjoys all of Anderson's work, even I would agree that his films are becoming more elaborate and his style more pronounced.

His latest feature, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is the delightfully manic tale of a hotel concierge who is framed for murder. Of course, nothing that simple could adequately explain the plot of a Wes Anderson picture, or its cast of characters and caricatures, so we begin in 1985, as a writer (Tom Wilkinson) is recording an interview about his book, "The Grand Budapest Hotel." Insisting that the book is based on real events, the writer begins to recall how, in 1968, his younger self (Jude Law) was regaled by the story, which came directly from the hotel proprietor, Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham). While we spend very little time in 1985 -- a section whose purpose will only come into focus at the very end of the movie -- the 1968 portion lovingly lingers, and is periodically returned to throughout the picture. Law and Abraham have an easy chemistry, and Jason Schwartzman, an Anderson regular since he made his debut in Rushmore, shows up for a spell in this section also.