Critics reviews

No less than his other films, The Grand Budapest Hotel elevates as a fundamental value the refusal to let environment and circumstance determine identity. Idiosyncrasy isn't an indulgence; seemingly precious details are nothing less than bulwarks against the slow creep of twilight. That Gustave H., standing in for his creator, is aware of the futility of the effort makes this Anderson's most affecting movie yet.

Like a few of Jean Renoir's heroes, the characters in Wes Anderson's latest and greatest film are scrambling to maintain a degree of compassion and stately civility in the midst of the unfathomable symbolic rise of the Axis party.

There's a touch of Groucho in Gustave's loping run, attraction to rich dowagers, and arch one-liners, and something of Stefan Zweig in his groomed mustache, practiced bonhomie, and what Hannah Arendt, not a fan, termed the writer's "hypersensitivity to social humiliation." (Interestingly, Anderson has also cited Eichmann in Jerusalem as an influence on his film.)

...Anderson is able to revisit a crisis point in modernity – specifically the outbreak of World War II – with an insouciance and a bemused distance that in no way approaches irony or a mocking historical presentism. Instead, Anderson treats the "world of yesterday" a bit like Stravinsky adopted Pergolesi, if not quite attaining the ideal of Pierre Menard's "Cervantes." That is to say, Anderson occupies this period from a distinct distance but with an undeniable sincerity and curiosity.

Having crafted elaborate mini-universes in film after film, the hotel represents simultaneously the most idealistic and most self-conscious expression of the pure, untainted world Anderson's films and characters have strived for. What gives the film such poignancy is that its utopia is acknowledged as something elusive and illusory. Anderson erects four layers of temporal and psychological remove...

If Anderson has previously allowed his twee melancholy to suffocate his storytelling, The Grand Budapest Hotel makes his fixation with the past, in Gustave's fight to preserve his cherished, outmoded customs against the inexorable march of history, into the very stuff of its drama. It is, of course, a losing battle, but it's difficult not to marvel at the effort.

The Grand Budapest Hotel has all the charm, fussiness, and intricate whimsy typical of Anderson's work. As often in his films, it cuts its preciosity with moments of offhand brutality (sliced-off fingers) and flashes of naughty sexuality (fellatio, the Egon Schiel painting). With its ensemble cast, sometimes deployed in cameos, it suggests a PoMo remake of those sprawling, self-congratulatory spoofs of the 1960s...

The wistful undercurrent that underlies Anderson's best work is muted here, but Grand Budapest's surface is so intensely pleasurable that its loss isn't keenly felt. Despite a closing acknowledgement to Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, this could only be Wes Anderson's work; his unique sensibility is a national treasure.

The eighth film by director Wes Anderson and, if not the best, certainly the most expansive and ambitious... There isn't enough space here to describe how amazing the film looks. The production design is a character in its own right: the hotel's colour-coded rooms, the unfeasibly enormous painting of a mountain valley that watches over the guests at dinner, the arching staircases like the two halves of Tower Bridge in the background. The detail... is relentlessly inventive.

Anderson's approach to filmmaking, so well-suited to handling personal loss, private resentments, tension within closed groups and moments of comic realization, is uneasily matched to the kind of loss felt by nations or peoples... particularly when the losses in question came long before his time. What redeems the film, to my mind, is the productive tension it sets up between its melancholic picture of Europe in decay and the manic, whiz-bang adventure story that makes up its central narrative.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is an extremely funny film, though the humor may have you chuckling mutedly, one eyebrow arched, rather than guffawing. It's also a very sad film, charged with a nostalgic melancholy that is part of its very structure... The nostalgia for a lost world that never was is more acute in The Grand Budapest Hotel than in any of Anderson's films, and it's the flippancy of the whole enterprise... that makes the superficiality so poetic—or if you like, so paradoxically deep.

The Grand Budapest Hotel" is about the spiritual heritage and the political force of those long-vanished styles—about the substance of style, not just the style of his Old World characters but also, crucially, Anderson's own. This isn't Anderson's most personal film, in the strict sense, but it is, alongside "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," his most reflexive one—even more so because the new film exposes the inner workings not just of his practice of filmmaking but of his sensibility.