The moment of Wes Anderson in The Grand Budapest Hotel

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

It’s a tough choice, but if I had to pick the most Wes Anderson moment in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” it would be the part when inmates escape from a prison using tiny sledgehammers and pickaxes that have been smuggled past the guards inside fancy frosted pastries. This may, come to think of it, be the most Wes Anderson thing ever, the very quintessence of his impish, ingenious and oddly practical imagination. So much care has been lavished on the conceit and its execution that you can only smile in admiration, even if you are also rolling your eyes a little.

This is a movie concerned with — and influenced by — an especially rich and complicated slice of 20th-century European culture, and therefore a reckoning, characteristically playful but also fundamentally serious, with some very ugly history.

Throughout, we are in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka, a mountainous land that cartographers of various eras might have plotted on the distant marches of successive empires — Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Soviet — or else erased altogether. The main story is rendered in narrow, boxy dimensions that evoke the films of its era, which is the 1930s. But there are two frames around this narrative, which is in effect a flashback within a flashback. We start out in 1985, under a late-Communist gray sky in a town of cemeteries and statues. An aging writer (Tom Wilkinson) shoos away his grandson and recalls the time in 1968 when his younger self (Jude Law) stayed at the nearly empty, Iron Curtain-tacky Grand Budapest Hotel and became acquainted with its elegant and enigmatic proprietor, Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham).

For his part, Moustafa reminisces about his first days at the hotel, where he was a mere lobby boy known as Zero (Tony Revolori) and the place was dominated by its charismatic concierge, M. Gustave. Portrayed by Ralph Fiennes with high-stepping liveliness and an evocative mustache, Gustave is both courtier and sovereign, a devoted servant to the guests and the capricious, mostly benevolent ruler of the staff. He corrects their slightest lapses of deportment and lectures them endlessly at mealtimes. He is a lover of poetry and also of the elderly women who summon him to their suites, and maybe of a few men as well. Somehow, he is both an ascetic and a sensualist, highly disciplined and completely irresponsible. A thoroughly ridiculous man and at the same time “a glimmer of civilization in the barbaric slaughterhouse we know as humanity.”

That phrase occurs twice in the film and is the key to its intentions. In the real 1930s, places like Zubrowka were on the brink of inconceivable barbarism and unprecedented slaughter. A beautiful, fragile Central European civilization was all but demolished, surviving mainly as the ghostly object of nostalgic longing. Mr. Anderson embraces this nostalgia — for a bygone modernity of railway compartments,

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