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" With The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson tips his hat to 1932&amp;#039;s glamorous Grand Hotel; the heavy-handed drama of the original was no great shakes, but it looked good, and besides a couple of Barrymores it boasted two jaw-dropping young stars: Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford. A latter-day critic called it a &amp;quot;gleaming deco dinosaur.&amp;quot;  You could say that about Anderson&amp;#039;s film\u2014only his dinosaur is alive and well and full of gut-busting jokes, many of them cheerfully lewd. First seen shimmering in the distance, Anderson&amp;#039;s grand hotel is a delicate pale-pink chimera so beautifully wrought that it looks like it might float right up to heaven. But even the most elegant hotels harbor earthy secrets, suggested here with walls of rich red silk, touches of gaudy gilt, and most of all the legendary Gustave H., Ralph Fiennes&amp;#039; deliciously seductive concierge, whose exquisite charm makes women melt and men fume. The movie&amp;#039;s massive multinational cast includes a score of A-list actors, with Fiennes and Tilda Swinton leading the pack. While such Anderson regulars as Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman reliably pop up, part of the fun is spotting all the other stars. My favorite aha moment was recognizing the bald-headed boss of a prison gang who agrees to spring Gustave and his new prot\u00E9g\u00E9, Zero Moustafa, solemnly played by young newcomer Tony Revolori. Related: Wes Anderson Talks Moonrise Kingdom and His Next Project Why are Zero and his dashing mentor in prison? You may well ask, but don&amp;#039;t spend too much time on it. The hilarious goings-on in this well-appointed madhouse and its snowy environs are so relentless they engulf you. And that&amp;#039;s the point. This isn&amp;#039;t the finely honed wit and mannered eccentricity that usually brings the chuckles in an Anderson film. The eccentricity is here\u2014just wait till you see Swinton&amp;#039;s getups. But Anderson is doing a fearless thing: going out on a limb, or on the kind of stage where the audience loves to boo you and a guy waits in the wings with a hook the size of your neck. Related: Josh Brolin and Kate Winslet Make an Exquisite, Unexpected Pairing in &amp;#039;Labor Day&amp;#039; In short, Anderson is shooting the moon, giving us a raucous, 150-proof comedy in the Marx Brothers vein. I half expected to see Harpo squeezing his horn and flinging his leg over Swinton&amp;#039;s arm in lieu of the long-suffering Margaret Dumont. Never mind that the story is set in early-twentieth-century Eastern Europe, with unnamed wars threatening to erupt all around. Or that a key character arrives on screen dead before we&amp;#039;ve even had a chance to meet her. All this mayhem would be distressing if it weren&amp;#039;t so funny. (Mussolini banned Duck Soup because he thought it was about him.) With this kind of broad, gloriously rude humor, it&amp;#039;s the joke that matters. As for Swinton&amp;#039;s Madame D., the wealthy octogenarian patroness of the hotel, we mostly see her in lively flashbacks because she&amp;#039;s not just dead, she&amp;#039;s been murdered. A wild fight ensues over Madame&amp;#039;s considerable fortune, with Jeff Goldblum as the scrupulous executor and Adrian Brody as a dubious, tantrum-throwing relative who demands the lion&amp;#039;s share and hires a pathological assassin (Willem Dafoe) to dispatch the true claimant: Gustave H. This forces the concierge and his sidekick to spend a lot of time fleeing, but no matter where they are\u2014remember that prison?\u2014Gustave continues Zero&amp;#039;s lessons in savoir faire. When they return to the hotel from time to time, Anderson never fails to treat us to a quick glimpse of an irresistible pornographic poster in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec. The pairing of the two men is classic, with Revolori&amp;#039;s stiff-necked young Zero (he&amp;#039;s engaged to Saoirse Ronan&amp;#039;s assistant baker) playing straight man to Gustave&amp;#039;s suave, worldly grace. Fiennes is a great actor but sometimes seems cold. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, he&amp;#039;s warm and openhearted, making Gustave a steadfast hero. Asked if he prefers men or women, he says, &amp;quot;I sleep with all my friends. It&amp;#039;s only proper.&amp;quot; The movie&amp;#039;s best line comes when he confides to Zero the identity of one of his more improbable sleeping partners; Gustave gently chides Zero for his appalled astonishment and murmurs in his velvet voice, &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s dynamite in the sack.&amp;quot; For such a gifted filmmaker, Anderson gets more than his share of critical jabs. I myself didn&amp;#039;t like anything about his 2012 film, Moonrise Kingdom\u2014by far his greatest success with both the critics and the money men. But that effort served to help this adventurous filmmaker get funding for more ambitious fare, such as The Grand Budapest Hotel. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/reviews/a12680/wes-anderson-the-grand-budapest-hotel-movie-review/>