The Grand Budapest Hotel offers a bustling movie getaway most Wes Anderson fans will find irresistible. A wild romp set in a 1930s Eastern European mountain resort, it features a colourful assortment of players and a story within a story within a story that keeps burrowing deeper into its own silly seriousness. The plot unfolds backwards, as unspooled by the owner of the hotel to one of its guests, relating his beginnings as the establishment’s bellboy, Zero. Zero and his mentor, the hotel’s long time, ladies-man concierge, the ultra-dapper Monsieur Gustave , become friends and co-conspirators in a spiralling, sprawling misadventure that includes a murder, a missing will, a purloined painting, an outlandish prison break, and the outbreak of something that resembles World War II.
Everyone seems to be having a big old time in the big old hotel, and everywhere else, and several scenes are real jems, like the scampering prison escape—which feels like a live-action re-enactment of something from the stop-motion animation antics of The Fantastic Mr. Fox—and an extended sequence in which a secret cadre of other concierges drop everything to help one of their own out of a jam.
