You know you've got a hell of a movie when you can't make room for Jude Law, F. Murray Abraham, Jason Schwartzman or Harvey Keitel until the very end of the trailer.
Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel has had a stacked cast from the very beginning, but mind that your head doesn't start spinning watching the film's first trailer. What starts off as a little adventure inside yet another dollhouse-like Wes Anderson setting turns into a globe-trotting adventure, with Ralph Fiennes as the gangly and energetic of the hero of the moment, a concierge accused of murdering the elderly guest he was romantically involved with.
Yes, that's Tilda Swinton underneath all that old age makeup. Yes, that's Adrien Brody landing punches at the reading of the will. That's Saoirse Ronan with an apparent face tattoo, slipping seamlessly into the kind of romantic close-up Wes Anderson gives all his heroines (case in point). And most of all that's Ralph Fiennes, going all posh and daffy as an Andersonian hero-- he's basically The Fantastic Mr. Fox in human form-- but keeping that slippery European-ness about him as well. This will be Anderson's first film set in Europe (unless you count The Fantastic Mr. Fox's vaguely English setting), and Fiennes seems to make a perfect transitionary hero-- the bluster of Royal Tennenbaum, the romanticism of Max Fischer, the spirit of adventure of Moonrise Kingdom's Sam, all with a perfectly continental mustache to back it up.
The Grand Budapest Hotel doesn't open until March 7, but don't take that early-year release date as a lack of faith-- Moonrise Kingdom opened in May last year and became Anderson's biggest financial success, earning its own Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay on top of that. Anderson's films are idiosyncratic enough that they seem to fare better outside of the awards season craziness, and just a few days after this year's awards telecast we get to peek back inside his next intricate creation. The question isn't so much "Are you excited?" as "What are you most excited about?" Jump in the comments and let us know-- right now it's Tilda Swinton's old age makeup for me, but I might change my answer to Jeff Goldblum's mustache if you ask me again in a few hours.
Check out the film's poster below.
