To me, Marshall seems as though he was providing a neutral answer with the two parts (1. Marbury deserves the paper 2. But he's in the wrong place/He skipped the lower courts.) Was he even being partisan? What political party was he favoring?
It's worth noting that Marshall did not conjure Judicial Review out of nowhere, as it was at least alluded to as a concept in Hamilton's Federalist 78.
Philosophically, he was a Federalist - even long after there was no more Federalists around. Although the case was technically a win for the Jeffersonians, as the judge whose appointment they were trying to block was not seated, the power of judicial review to negate legislative actions is a huge, huge increase in Federal power. That's Federalist to its core: as was Marshall.
The tension between the Federalist court reigning in the rising Jacksonian populists is a common theme in teaching the US early 1800s.