Wes Anderson continues to mine the same depths he excavated when he filmed Royal Tenenbaums, but with perhaps less success now than then. It’s clearly his lockdown movie. The result is a film that’s thematically incohesive and inconsequential, but enjoyable. It’s not flawless, but it’s my kind of flawed. I would eagerly watch it again. Something about the level of visible grief here made me suspect Anderson was going through something — but then again, weren’t we all not that long ago?
There are elements of Grand Budapest in this that I loved. I would watch an entire film of Steve Carrell “selling” parcels of land and managing his little hotel. And while my wife found it distracting by the end, I was entranced by the outer story of the play. I want more of that.