The best Wes Anderson film yet

To be honest I don't think I've ever liked a Wes Anderson film - all of them so cute and self-conscious, all those precocious children and narcissistic, eccentric families - and was pleasantly surprised to find myself very engaged with The Grand Budapest Hotel, which seems to me his best movie by far and the first time he's used his great talent to make a movie about anything other than his talent and quirkiness. The GBH is by no means a realistic movies; it's a comic romp, not believable for a minute, but nevertheless lots of fun, a fast moving plot, quirky but still quite likable characters, mainly driven by R. Fiennes as the concierege of the hotel in the 1930s and by a very likable new actor who plays the "lobby boy" under RF's tutelage, named Zero. The story is enclosed in several layers of time, and essentially narrated by a now elderly Zero (F M Abraham) to a young writer, in about 1980; the writer turns this narration into the eponymous novel; and the writer, now dead, is honored by devotees in his fictional E. European city (modeled on Stefan Zweig I learned from the credits - will have to read him): the point of all these layers is that we are not to take the events literally - they are a series of narrations, each with its own possibility for exaggeration, distortion, and invention - including Anderson's own invention. At what level - Zero's narration, the novelist's invention, Anderson's depiction - the story changes and evolves and becomes a fantasy rather than an adventure story, nobody can say and it doesn't really matter. Anderson does a great job re-creating the hotel and its milieu in two settings: one as a bustling and lively grand resort in the 30s, the other as a decayed, musty, nearly deserted "white elephant" in the 80s, the grandness lost to and to evolving taste. Although it's a bit of a bauble, without any great meaning or significance (nor does it pretend to be a deeply significant film; issues such as the rise of Nazism, the Soviet control over Eastern Europe, the fall of Communism are at hinted at, but the story is not about history and politics, it's about two several men - very male-dominated film, I have to say - and their star-crossed lives) it's totally fun to watch.