The Grand Budapest Hotel

How sluggardly you feel coming home from a Wes Anderson movie. Back to the rubber-band scrum and plastic miscellany of the kitchen junk drawer. Hello again, indifferently folded cotton clothing. Hiya, maybe-not-even-real-wood shelves of paperback fictions and aluminum-pressed recordings. Thanks for nothing, artless detritus of the postmillennial mass market. There’s nary a secret-society membership pin in sight, let alone lapel.

It’s enough to send you right back out to see The Grand Budapest Hotel again. Anderson’s new movie, a wintry ode to Continental storytelling and the cinema of at least two lost eras, brims with his thematic and visual obsessions and includes much of his evolving repertory company. But if Hotel sometimes feels like the writer-director’s junk drawer — a little redundant at this point in his career, a tad overstuffed — it’s also a comfort. Your junk drawer has a 2008 D battery. Anderson’s has Ralph fucking Fiennes (who hasn’t been this delightfully profane since In Bruges).

But let’s reset the metaphor. Hotel, the bulk of which unfolds in 1932 but is recounted in 1968 (in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka, a neighbor to the Fredonia of 1933’s Duck Soup), isn’t one drawer but rather a top-of-the-line steamer trunk full of prewar matinee tropes: noble-rot farce, prison picture, cross-country chase. And there’s at least one body under the silks and soaps in that valise, thanks to a near-silent Willem Dafoe, in teeth-glinting Macheath mode. His casting is only the most obvious way in which Anderson’s latest suggests a live-action variation on his stop-motion Roald Dahl adaptation, 2009’s endlessly rewarding Fantastic Mr. Fox.

There are newish notes here. Beyond Dafoe’s leathery menace, a light breeze of war whistles under the story’s heavy estate doors and through its pink-suite keyholes, occasionally ruffling Fiennes’ pretty hair. Fascist storm troopers of an unnamed Nazi-like force crowd the plot and dilute its whimsy, doing their worst offscreen. Not unusually in an Anderson film, some characters don’t make it through to the end. But those we meet later in life (F. Murray Abraham takes over for newcomer Tony Revolori as Zero Moustafa, the orphan whose bildungsroman this is; Jude Law, Zero’s nameless amanuensis, will turn into Tom Wilkinson before writing the tale) convey themselves from behind a scrim of Proustian melancholy that’s a natural extension of Anderson’s fetish for complicated childhood. Still, even with the occasional intrusion by death squad, mortality here isn’t a pall as much as it is a bit of toile needing a quick sponging off. Anderson’s fable comes absent death camps and the Prague Spring.

Much remains in place within Anderson’s usual clockworks: labyrinthine interiors; a mentor-protégé bond that tests, then defines, the mechanics of duty and loyalty; the feel, with its familiar casting and its painted backdrops and its winking miniatures (viva la model department), of a town pageant. Alexandre Desplat’s score swishes and ticks and tings along with the action. The cable cars and cobbled roads and alpine-peaked pastries, the butler’s pantries and vertiginous stairways and private train cars — these Old World touches would feel somehow at home in any previous Anderson movie. Where new meets old lasts only a haunting few seconds, as Saoirse Ronan pedals a bicycle, a vision of first love pulled tighter soon after, in a close-up of her face bathed in a carnival glow. Robert Yeoman, Anderson’s longtime cinematographer, surpasses himself here, never more than when he trains his lights on Ronin.

All of this Anderson maps inside the confident, playful frame-checking of past masters. We get Lubitsch in square aspect ratio, Kubrick in the anamorphic scenes, and Hitchcock throughout (a glowing glass of milk early on pays conspicuous homage, and a wordless foot chase through a vast museum and its gallery of battle armor makes you wish that Anderson would remake Blackmail). And yes, other masters — Anderson must now be counted among the movies’ most sure-handed auteurs.

Whether you relish cataloging, say, every orange electric typewriter or paramilitary epaulet in Anderson’s fussy compositions, or you roll your eyes when you hear Fox Searchlight pimping Hotel in paid NPR interstitials, your 2014 moviegoing to some degree trickles down from his vision. We’ve grown so inured to artifice — to 3-D and CGI, yes, but even to sitcoms that make extensive use of green screens — that little in the cultural bazaar is necessarily less precious or distracting than what Anderson does. But little else merits close reading, either. The multiplex is our national junk drawer, and Michael Bay wants to cut off your finger with the can opener.

How sluggardly I feel not having gotten around to nodding at the rest of Anderson’s jack-in-the-box cast or attempted to outline the McGuffin-y plot. It isn’t a question of spoilers but of space. The Grand Budapest Hotel — the unreal movie and the more unreal place — is both too full and eerily vacant. Like the best of Anderson’s work, though, it sits ready to accommodate you — your film-nerd baggage; your own not-so-cinematic memories; and your longing for a more beautiful strain of reminiscence, which looks a lot like this.