On this day there’s a tradition of gentle pranks, whimsical surprises, unexpected amusements after a long, gray unfunny winter. Ideal, then, that a new Wes Anderson movie has finally arrived in Podunk. There have been rumors of it from the Big City, then news that it was playing a couple weeks ago in the middling city down the road, but now it has gotten to the outback.

His latest is called “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and characteristically it is not set in Budapest. The movie tells the tale of the proper concierge of the grand hotel in the autumn of its splendor during the Great Depression. He is M. Gustave, played with becoming precision and hauteur by Ralph Fiennes. He is a man who demands perfection from his staff and who personally sees to the every whim of the guests, especially the wealthy widows.

M. Gustave takes under his wing as Lobby Boy a striving orphan appropriately named Zero (Tony Revolori) and together they experience kaleidoscopic adventures when Gustave tries to claim an inheritance from one of his deceased guests. Her family resorts to any expedient to deny it to him. The divine silliness includes a chase on skis and dogsled (sans dogs), switched wills, an art heist, a prison break and train rides in which our heroes are roughed up by one tyrannical regime after another – the history of the 20th Century in Central Europe in capsule form.

All is told in flashback by an aged Zero, now known as Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), once the heir to Gustave’s fortune but now living in a squalid room in the decaying hotel. He has lost both inheritance and hotel in the latest change of fortune for his homeland. The fluffy Viennese waltz of the hotel’s early years has been replaced by the drab decrepitude of the worker’s paradise.

As usual with Anderson, the art direction alone is worth the price of admission. Much in the Grand Budapest looks like a child’s pop-up book. Also as usual the Wes Anderson indie stock company is in evidence with frequent collaborators in minor parts – Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Bob Balaban, Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody.

Anderson is an interesting case of the American auteur like Woody Allen and Orson Welles before him. His movies have a handmade feel and he relies in front and behind the camera on many of the same people again and again. A family of sorts? He makes films that attract a loyal following and critical praise, but he has never had a mass market hit, in part because he works in no conventional genre. They are personal projects from one man’s slant. They do seem to dwell on a few themes that appear to come from life.

Anderson grew up in Houston, the son of prosperous parents with advertising and real estate careers who divorced when he was eight. He has identified that event as central to his life. He has two brothers and fractured families, absent parents and sibling relations are central to his films – Bottle Rocket, Rushmore (filmed at his own prep school – St. John’s), The Royal Tennenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited, Moonrise Kingdom.

Like one of his favorite directors, Francois Truffaut, Anderson has a soft spot for the young and misunderstood. In Rushmore and Budapest a clever outsider is befriended by an older father figure. In Darjeeling and Tennenbaums bewildered adults are still trying to come to terms with bizarre parents. In Moonrise Kingdom, the young people give up on the hopeless adults and run away to the woods to form their own imaginary Arden. In almost all cases, brotherhood trumps all other bonds.

If Woody Allen has melded Groucho and Bergman and Spielberg is forever revisiting Saturday matinee popcorn genres, Anderson seems to inhabit the land of the Grimm Brothers with their wicked stepmothers, lost and found siblings, scary trolls and lucky heroes.

Lurking behind the ethereal foolery of Budapest is the fact that it was inspired by the work of Stefan Zweig, an ornament of glorious turn of the century Vienna who saw its civilized life perish under the boots of Hitler’s ogres. Though Anderson’s movies seem light comic confections with a dash of the surreal, a closer look often reveals a tear in the eye of the clown.