His world had vanished long before he entered it.

I went to see the latest Wes Anderson movie a couple of times in the last week. If you haven't seen it, you'll be happy to learn that it's the good kind of Wes Anderson movie — the kind where real adult concerns lie behind the whimsical little episodes in a whimsical little world, provoking some genuine and well-earned emotion. As in The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited, and as not so much in The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Moonrise Kingdom, the quirky art direction and fast-paced witticisms in The Grand Budapest Hotel serve deeper, darker themes.

The majority of the film's action takes place between the wars in a fictional eastern European country whose historic culture is threatened by a new cynical barbarism, as represented by barely fictional Nazis called the "Zig Zag Division." Monsieur Gustave, the protagonist, is a tragicomic dandy struggling to preserve an already lost world of foppish etiquette and aristocratic kindness, à la Grand Illusion. Though it's fast-paced and zany, the story manages to feel like a Sebaldian meditation on cruelty and decay. Time marches ruthlessly, destructively forward, and if we want to imagine a better world, our best bet is to listen to the tragic stories of our elders.

Nostalgia is a theme that comes up a lot for Wes Anderson. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realize that most of his movies are about neurotically nostalgic people in meticulously controlled environments. They dislike the world as it is, so they create their own little worlds and maintain them according to the values of bygone days.

The feeling created is somewhere between cozy and claustrophobic, like when children make a closet into a "fort" and bring all their belongings into it. Max Fischer makes the insular life of private school bearable by starting up old-fashioned clubs that modern high school students are no longer interested in. The adult Tenenbaum children dress in their childhood clothes and each have their own room where they surround themselves with the achievements of their youth. Steve Zissou lives on (or rather, in) a Jacques-Cousteau-like exploratory ship where everything is branded in a seventies style. The Whitman brothers try to rekindle their family bonds in a train compartment. Mr. Fox lives in a tunnel under a tree and refuses to grow up. Sam Shakusky is a boy scout camping on an island.

One gets the sense that this is Anderson's own M.O. The films themselves revel in obsessive detail and old-fashioned techniques, presenting themselves as children's stories for adults. In the lighter ones, the director allows his nostalgia free reign, and we get a comforting, sentimental adventure. The characters may lose their control to outside forces temporarily, but it is regained and order restored with no major change in outlook.

On the other hand, when the protagonists' backward-looking need for control is shown not to be a workable characteristic, some real depth is achieved. When, as in The Grand Budapest Hotel, the fastidious world-making of a character is no match for the chaotic forces of nature (either human nature or nature nature), we feel that something real has been lost, and something learned in exchange. The director turns out not to be such a naïf after all, and we leave the theatre a little wiser.