“The Grand Budapest Hotel” is engaging yet rigid entertainment. In it writer/director Wes Anderson’s cinematic style has finally arrived at complete and fossilized self-parody.

 

Anderson’s abilities and reputation are such that no margin of the uncontrolled is allowed to creep in. Even the film’s most surprising moments feel mechanical and contained, submitting their oddity and potential to Anderson’s mania for control.

 

His camera dollies and pans move in perfect time with the score, which also sets the beats for jokes, plot development and line delivery. It has been his tendency since his first film to impose this kind of exacting meter. But early on he was more open to serendipity and the less planned.

 

“Rushmore” (1998) showed occasional glimpses of what would become this ruling tendency toward total control, which made a humorous juxtaposition against Bill Murray’s unhinged performance. The tension between control and chaos animated that movie.

 

Similarly with Anderson’s best film, “The Royal Tennenbaums” (2001), it was the dilapidation and entropy of the sets and the New York City the characters inhabited, at odds with the filmmaker’s desire for order, which gave that film its defining tone.

 

His work in miniatures with “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” (2009) showed him how to create environments in miniature, both materially real (as opposed to CGI) and completely his to control.

 

With “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” he has fit people within these constructed and contained miniaturizations, using forced perspective and canny editing. Never again is he likely to allow the untamed energy of a New York City or the Indian countryside of 2007’s “The Darjeeling Limited” to impose upon his stolid woodcut vision. The effect is less of watching a movie than of being read a very prim storybook.

 

Still, there is a lot of life and charm in “The Grand Budapest Hotel” despite Anderson’s maniacal straightjacketing of pacing and performance. He has an entertaining story to tell.

 

It is the story of a fictional contested region on the eastern outskirts of Europe at the outset of WW II. The hotel of the title is a luxury retreat high in the mountains. The fastidiously composed and attentive Messr. Gustave coordinates its daily operations. Gustave, played by Ralph Finnes, is a plausible stand in for Wes Anderson’s own puckish yet dictatorial presence.

 

Messr. Gustave is charming and erudite; he is dignified and principled but also dissipated and profligate. He is openly amorous with guests of all sexes and ages, while not surrendering his dignity. He does this as an extension of his duties as comforter and aide to the wealthy patrons of the hotel. From anticipating their drink preferences and knowing the right poem for any occasion, his attentions are an amenity of the Grand Budapest Hotel.

 

The plot involves a dead woman’s will, a stolen painting, a series of grisly murders and the looming specter of war. It is a chase movie done entirely in strictly contained frames. Even the pursuit scenes are held firmly in scene so that no degree of risk or excitement threatens to escape.

 

The number of hard won laughs in the film is impressive. Hard won because Anderson and his cast plan each one out to the –nth degree and achieve them the way one builds a miniature model of a luxury hotel: painstakingly one element at a time.

 

And while the audience’s enjoyment is genuine, the sense of being just another stultified element, thoroughly planned and contained in Anderson’s model, as though early storyboards might have shown the back of your own head thrown back in laughter, is unsettling.