'The Grand Budapest Hotel': Wes Anderson in full force

City Paper grade: A-

Imagine a grade-school diorama on the subject of Nazi Germany and you’ll have something approaching Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, a characteristically stylized fable set in a fictional country that nonetheless clearly addresses the spread of European fascism. It would be easy to recoil when you seen Ralph Fiennes’ M. Gustave, the fastidious hotel concierge, slapped into what looks an awful lot like a striped concentration-camp uniform, but as with Moonrise Kingdom, it’s the flashes of unstylized reality that give the film its grit. Even in the 1930s, the innermost of the movie’s nested temporal frames, Gustave is a man out of time, more Belle Époque than between the wars. He has an eager pupil in new “lobby boy” Zero (Tony Revolori) and a wide range of elderly lovers.The death of one, played by a liver-spotted Tilda Swinton, sets in motion a scuffle for her prized Vermeer-like canvas, coveted by her ungrateful eldest son (Adrien Brody) and sought by Willem Dafoe’s terrifying en-forcer, a silent-movie nightmare who might as well be called Max Schreck of the SS. As always, there are glorious contraptions aplenty, like a bright pink pastry box that folds up with a single frictionless tug of a ribbon. And the movie is a contraption itself, with a deadpan pace that’s part Mack Sennett and part Jean Vigo. The evocation of cinema’s tubercular surrealist is an unexpected one, but it fits with the movie’s darker undercurrents, always swirling beneath its pastry-like exterior. In some ways, The Grand Budapest Hotel feels like a career summation, but it’s also, along with Moonrise Kingdom and Fantastic Mr. Fox, a sign that Anderson has raised himself to a new plane, one where his distinctive aesthetics have greater emotional resonance.