Wes Anderson's eighth feature is a clockwork wedding cake, an eccentric caper movie sprinkled with pixie dust, a picture that sends you scrambling for clever metaphors and failing to find them. It's a movie of enormous charm, thanks to its many fine actors, and it has a serene formal beauty. (Cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman, production designer Adam Stockhausen and composer Alexandre Desplat are all veteran Anderson collaborators.) If it were a wedding cake, it might be found to consist mostly of icing. But the icing is very tasty.

The story is set in the fictitious central European republic of Zubrowka, at the titular Grand Budapest Hotel, an Alpine spa resort of celebrated elegance. It begins in 1985, with an unnamed author (Tom Wilkinson) recollecting a pilgrimage he made to the place in 1968, when it was sunk in the shabby decline of the communist era. At this point, the writer is played by Jude Law, and in the hotel's largely empty restaurant, we see him dining with the current proprietor, one Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham). Zero regales him with tales of the hotel's cosmopolitan heyday in the early 1930s and, in particular, its legendary concierge, Monsieur Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), a lovable martinet by whom the very young Zero (diminutive Tony Revolori) was employed as a lowly lobby boy.

The story takes root in this period, situated precariously between the two world wars. Many odd things happen. Gustave has a romantic taste for the hotel's elderly lady patrons. On hearing news of the death of one such ancient crone — a countess called Madame D. (Tilda Swinton, buried alive in prosthetic droops and wattles) — Gustave feels compelled to pay his respects. "She was dynamite in the sack," he tells Zero, hauling the boy along with him to the train station.

Upon arrival at the countess's mansion, they learn that she died under mysterious circumstances. They also encounter her devious son, Dmitri (Adrien Brody), who is not at all happy to see the interloping concierge and even less delighted to hear from his mother's attorney (Jeff Goldblum in a trim Freudian beard) that she had recently made out a new will. Panicked that he may not be the sole heir to the countess's estate, which includes a priceless Renaissance painting, Dmitri dispatches a prognathous thug, named Jopling (Willem Dafoe, delightfully fearsome), to eliminate any possible complications.

Gustave is startled to find himself arrested for the countess's murder. He's thrown behind bars and there enlisted in a jailbreak being planned by a heavily tattooed con, named Ludwig (Harvey Keitel, sounding as if he just stepped away from a Martin Scorsese shoot). Meanwhile, Zero falls in love with a baker's apprentice, named Agatha (Saoirse Ronan), who's renowned for her pastry skills. Gustave, on the run, appeals for help to an underground league of fellow concierges. (Bill Murray and Bob Balaban are among its members.) We also have a sympathetic army captain (Edward Norton), a terrified butler (Mathieu Amalric), a group of mountaintop monks and a fluffy cat that comes to a flattening end.

The movie is an exercise in amiable whimsy. Anderson's familiar techniques are in full blossom: the deadpan framing, the obsessive shot geometry, the madly detailed furnishings and carefully graded color designs (cherry reds into pinks and purples and mauves). The story is as light as a cream éclair, but its fanciful incidents are shaded by real-world history. The director says his script was inspired by the works of the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig, who was forced to flee the rising Nazis around the time in which the story takes place. So along with all the movie's madcap helter-skelter, there are occasional intrusions of ominous soldiers who could easily pass for Nazis themselves. But these intimations of approaching horror are a little too weightless, and when, in a postscript, one of the characters is said to have later succumbed to "the Prussian grippe," the strained euphemism seems unpleasantly arch.

Still, the many characters and their peculiar doings have a certain dizzy appeal, and Fiennes, in particular, lends the picture a lightly demented comic energy. (At one point, he addresses the dead countess in her casket: "You look better than you have in years," he fondly observes.) Anderson may not have intended the story to engross us in any meaningful way; if he did, well, it doesn't. It's a pleasant journey to a stylized simulacrum of a quaint, vanished age. But when it's over, you might wonder where it is that you've actually been — and maybe even why you were taken there.

Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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