Review:

The Grand Budapest Hotel (15)

Dir: Wes Anderson

With: Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, F Murray Abraham

Runtime: 100 minutes

IF Wes Anderson's pictures were part of a hotel chain you could set the lobby clock as to what to expect from a stay. For starters, there would be hot and cold running kookiness, lift muzak by the hippest band in town, and a design style straight off the cover of a vintage edition of The New Yorker.

For his fans, there can be no better place to rest their weary, 21st century, urbanite bones. Even for new guests there is much in The Grand Budapest Hotel to delight, not least Ralph Fiennes showing he is as skilled a comedian as he is a serious thesp and director.

Somehow, though, this viewer had trouble checking out of the Grand Budapest with the sort of satisfaction that followed the Rushmore sojourn, the Royal Tenenbaums mini-break, and the Fantastic Mr Fox fortnight. The Grand Budapest had its charms, but the Fantastic Mr Fiennes aside, they tended to fade fast.

The picture opens in vaguely modern times in a hotel long since past its best. Jude Law's "Young Writer" is one of the regular guests, a collection of eccentrics who stay for old times' sake, or because they want to be as alone as one can be rattling around in a thinly populated hotel.

A new arrival catches the writer's eye, the mysterious Mr Moustafa (F Murray Abraham). As the lobby boy (Jason Schwartzman, one of many Anderson regulars in the film) tells him, Mr Moustafa stays every year and always asks for the smallest, tiniest room in the place even though he could afford much more. Intrigued and sensing a good story, the writer joins Mr Moustafa for dinner.

Mr Moustafa, it turns out, knew the hotel back in its glory days, and over the course of a meal he tells its tale and how he figured in it. So Anderson turns the clock back to a stranger, more complex time when the Grand Budapest was an olde worlde unto itself and the likes of Tilda Swinton's Madame D was a guest.

Madame D is a lady of a certain age and wealth. Catering to her needs, and those of many another, is Fiennes' Monsieur Gustave: the concierge of concierges, the baron of the bow and scrape, the arch fixer.

Whatever a guest needs, Gustave can obtain, as long as the price is right. What he cannot seem to make disappear are Madame D's nerves as she leaves the hotel to return to her family for a spell. When that brood is revealed in all its greedy, odious nature, one can well understand why she hesitates.

From here, Anderson, working from his own screenplay, weaves a story that travels through peacetime and war, riches and poverty, foul deeds and farce. The sleepy, luxurious hotel set on a snowy mountaintop is about to have its calm shattered, with Gustave at the centre of events.

Such is the thick fog of whimsy that Anderson builds up, it comes as something of a shock when world war intrudes. Global conflict stands as a metaphor for all the ugliness, vulgarity and mean spirit that the Grand Budapest tries to keep outside its padded doors.

Only Gustave, it seems, can hold the line this time, and courtesy of Madam D's family he has other problems to deal with.

Fiennes would not perhaps be any casting director's first choice for playing a concierge. Grandness seems to run through his veins like the Danube flows through Budapest. True, he stooped to play a villain's part in Harry Potter, but Voldemort is a blue blooded, born-to-rule sort of rogue, the kind of prince of darkness who would shop at Waitrose.

But Gustave, as we shall see, is not just any concierge and Fiennes has a ball playing him as such. English, campy, sweary, and monumentally bitchy, this downstairs character is a hoot and a half, and the main reason to see Anderson's otherwise familiar film.

Also adding value is Tony Revolori, playing Zero, the apprentice lobby boy who, like Saoirse Ronan's patissier, helps Gustave in his hour of need. These new faces aside, those who like to play Anderson bingo, ticking off each member of what has now become his cast of regulars, will have a busy hour and 40 minutes.

That much remains the same in Anderson's cosy, lovingly crafted world will please his admirers. It is not that his films are totally divorced from reality, it is just that any unpleasantness that does turn up is only ever there to play a bit part. Thank heavens for escapism and all that, but unless you have a high tolerance level for whimsy, all this feyness can fair make the teeth itch after a while.

Anderson is a true auteur, his films belonging to the one family in look and outlook. Occasionally, though, as with Fantastic Mr Fox, it would be nice to go somewhere a little different. In cinema, as in life and the hotel trade, a change is as good as a rest.