The most Wes Anderson-y moment of the almost excruciatingly Wes Anderson-y new Wes Anderson movie “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is the arrival, at a prison security desk, of foodstuffs meant for the inmates. A loaf of bread? Violently stabbed. A sausage? Sliced to bits. Then comes an enchanting little pastry, a frail folly of icing and butter. To check it for the hidden and forbidden would be to destroy it. So the guards (unseen, unremarked upon) simply pass it through untouched.
It contains, of course, digging tools with which our heroes will break out of prison.
A world that worked Anderson’s way would be delicious to contemplate, but this self-consciously zany film is a take on Central Europe in the 20th century. The thing that Anderson knows about WWI is that the Germans wore these funny mustaches. WWII? He finds the SS logo wacky.
Let me back up, as the film does: Beginning in 1985, it shoots back to the ’60s. A bored writer, played by Jude Law, staying in a run-down, garishly Commie-colored Alpine hotel, meets an old man, Zero Moustafa, played by F. Murray Abraham. He turns out to be the hotel’s mysterious owner.
As a boy in the 1930s (we flittingly flash back again), Zero was a lobby boy and aide to the manic master concierge M. Gustave (played with queeny gusto by Ralph Fiennes), whose habit of romancing elderly rich women has left him with a fortune after one of them (Tilda Swinton) died.
She willed M. Gustave a priceless painting, but Gustave and Zero steal it anyway, pursued by the will’s executor (Jeff Goldblum), her incensed Nazi-ish son (Adrien Brody) and an accompanying assassin (Willem Dafoe). Zero romances a pastry baker (Saoirse Ronan), who has a birthmark shaped liked Mexico because why wouldn’t she?
M. Gustave gets thrown in prison, joins a cabal with fellow inmates (Harvey Keitel pops up), escapes with the aid of a mysterious international brotherhood of concierges (here we edge too close to “The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders,” the “SNL” spoof of Anderson), and — you get the picture. There’s whimsy on offer, industrial-grade.
The second time I saw the film (I have a feeling I’ll be reluctantly reviewing it several more times: Anderson puts so much vigor into the films that he makes you want to repay the favor), I more or less gave up on the intentionally ridiculous plot and tried to view the film in the inside-out way Anderson prefers.
The mise-en-scène, the frivolity and the froth aren’t just added attractions: They’re everything. If a character should be shot by a firing squad or strangled in a confessional, it’s all part of the mad whirl. The effect is droll at best, tedious at worst, which means that I have to consign “GBH” to the slappable corner of the Anderson oeuvre, together with “The Life Aquatic” and “The Darjeeling Limited.”
Movies like “The Great Dictator” and “To Be or Not To Be” lampooned Nazis with forceful satire. “GBH” is a featherweight screwball comedy that, trying mightily to be cosmopolitan, feels awfully provincial, desperately touristy: Europe is just this nutty place where a lot of crazy mixed-up stuff happened and look at this darling model ski lift! That’s Wes Anderson: He can’t see the forest for the twee.