Wes Anderson’s eagerly awaited and star-filled “The Grand Budapest Hotel’’ — shown to New York critics ahead of its Thursday world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival — is something of an enigma wrapped in a mystery.
Set primarily in a fictitious Eastern European country in 1932, it centers on Gustave H (Ralph Fiennes, in one of his best performances in years), the flamboyant concierge of the titular hotel, who is framed for murdering a wealthy old woman (Tilda Swinton, in one of many star cameos), a longtime lover who has left him a priceless Renaissance painting.
Helping Gustave escape from prison and seek a key witness (Mathieu Amalric) while fleeing a police captain (Edward Norton) and an assassin (Willem Dafoe) — who is employed by the murdered woman’s son (Adrien Brody) — is Zero Moustafa (newcomer Tony Revolori), a young lobby boy at the hotel who hails from a fictitious Middle Eastern country.
Other key roles are played by Saoirse Ronan, a young pastry chef who becomes Zero’s steadfast ally and love interest; Jeff Goldblum, a lawyer who’s the dutiful executor of the murdered woman’s estate; and a wonderful F. Murray Abraham a middle-aged Zero, who, in episodes set in the 1960s, narrates most of the story to a writer, played by Jude Law. (Tom Wilkinson plays an older version of the same writer, who also does some narrating, in a section set in the 1980s.)
Anderson regulars Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson and Bob Balaban have smaller roles as concierges, with Harvey Keitel popping up as a prisoner with a shaved head.
The film, which is mostly presented in the nearly-square aspect ratio of pre-1953 films, is a visual feast, with elaborately curated interiors and exteriors crammed with meticulous details.
Also typical of Anderson, there are endless digressions in a film that contains flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks. This narrative and visual density, for me, had the effect of making this 100-minute movie feel much, much longer.
“The Grand Budapest Hotel’’ is officially credited as having been “inspired” by the works of Viennese writer Stefan Zweig, and Anderson is quoted in the press notes as mentioning pre-code comedies.
But the film’s train sequences, and the looming presence of pre-World War II fascism, seem more like British-period Alfred Hitchcock — and Anderson includes an unmistakable homage to a much later Hitchcock classic as well.
My initial reaction is that Anderson’s new film is far less emotionally engaging than its predecessor, the wonderful “Moonrise Kingdom.’’ But I needed to watch that one a second time to see past its aggressively whimsical surface and truly grasp the greatness. So I’ll probably see “Budapest’’ again before my full review.
“The Grand Budapest Hotel’’ opens in the United States on March 7.