director
Wes Anderson
screenwriters
Wes Anderson
Owen Wilson
producers
Wes Anderson
Barry Mendel
Scott Rudin
cinematographer
Robert Yeoman
music
Mark Mothersbaugh
editor
Dylan Tichenor
cast
Gene Hackman (Royal Tenenbaum)
Anjelica Huston (Etheline Tenenbaum)
Ben Stiller (Chas Tenenbaum)
Gwyneth Paltrow (Margot Tenenbaum)
Luke Wilson (Richie Tenenbaum)
Owen Wilson (Eli Cash)
Danny Glover (Henry Sherman)
Bill Murray (Raleigh St. Clair)
Seymour Cassel (Dusty)
Kumar Pallana (Pagoda)
Alec Baldwin (Narrator)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 108m
u.s.
release: 12/14/01
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other wes
anderson films
reviewed on this website:
- the
life aquatic with steve zissou
- rushmore
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In only three films -- Bottle
Rocket, Rushmore,
and now The Royal Tenenbaums -- Wes Anderson has created
a distinct and consistent world. The lackadaisical suburban thieves
of Bottle Rocket might've gone to Rushmore Academy as
kids, and Max Fischer as a pre-pubescent playwright might've
put his work in competition with the equally precocious Margot
Tenenbaum's plays. There's a buzz of strangeness about Anderson's
world; in its way, it's as alien to us -- and as precisely rendered
-- as the Middle-earth of The
Fellowship of the Ring. This world has its own look and
sound, with morosely defiant oldies on the soundtrack underlining
the characters' malaise or passion.
Anderson loves overachievers
and underachievers -- particularly people who manage to be both
at once -- and he's got three of them here: the aforementioned
Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), the adopted daughter of the clan, who
peaked early as a playwright and now sulks in her tub for hours;
Chas Tenenbaum (Ben Stiller), a prodigious financial whiz overprotective
of his two sons since the death of his wife; and Richie Tenenbaum
(Luke Wilson), a former tennis champ who had a meltdown on the
court and thinks he's in love with Margot, but that's okay, since
"we're not related by blood." Slippery ethics, but
since patriarch Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) took every opportunity
to remind everyone of Margot's adopted status when introducing
her, who can blame Richie?
Royal, the sort of affable
bastard right up Hackman's alley, has been estranged from his
wife Etheline (Anjelica Huston) and children for years; one day
he slinks back into the picture with the news that he's dying.
Giving himself six weeks to put things right between himself
and his kids, Royal sets up a hospital room in his former house,
followed in rapid succession by Chas, Richie, and Margot, who
all move back into their old bedrooms, confronted daily with
the surroundings of their childhood greatness. Hanging around
for good measure is Richie's friend Eli Cash (Owen Wilson, who
for the third time cowrote the script with Anderson), who "always
wanted to be a Tenenbaum" but has settled for being a drug-addled
novelist; he zones out during a TV interview, and he defends
the failure of his first book with the standard artist's line
that it was too archaic for most people to understand.
Tenenbaums unfolds like a storybook tale, but
this is Anderson's most loosely plotted endeavor yet. Like Rushmore,
it's not so much about its story as about the moods and moments
the story makes possible. Here, for instance, is Margot's rumpled
neurologist husband Raleigh St. Clair (Bill Murray, swathed in
a foam of beard) tapping sadly on a window to get her attention.
Or family financial advisor Henry Sherman (Danny Glover) moving
in tentatively to kiss Etheline, while she grins girlishly in
anticipation, unearthing old feelings of desire and being desired
just as she'd unearthed a human skeleton a few minutes before.
Or a confrontation between Chas and Royal in a closet, surrounded
by shelves weighed down with ancient board games, underlining
the childishness of both men. Or the way all printed material
we see in the movie is in the same blocky all-caps Futura font
used for the title on the poster art, even the "walk/don't
walk" signs and the logos on hospital gowns -- in this universe
text is purely utilitarian, and the book covers we see are usually
good for a laugh. Or the predictably eclectic soundtrack, wherein
the Velvet Underground and the Ramones rub elbows with Mark Mothersbaugh's
otherworldly bells and organs and the beautifully apt use of
"Christmas Time Is Here" from A Charlie Brown Christmas
(I have to love a director so obsessed with Peanuts
that he made Max Fischer's dad a barber, just like Charlie Brown's
dad). Or Robert Yeoman's pristine, rigidly symmetrical widescreen
compositions, which give the characters ample space to mope in
solitude -- vast dead air on either side of them, and vertically
squashed; the horizontal proscenium of the movie becomes an oppressive
character in itself.
Sound like a downer? Not really
-- or not if you're attuned to Anderson's method of keeping heartbreak
at a slight remove. For him, the small moment takes care of the
large emotions, and we project the rest. Ben Stiller gives a
rather antagonistic performance with the tiniest bits of shading
(his reading of a key line near the end brings his character
nicely into focus); Gwyneth Paltrow stares at everything as if
from beyond the grave, a blonde goth princess who never looks
so pained as when she can't help smiling at something. The movie
doesn't overflow with false personality; character is in the
design, like the lonely-looking yellow tent in the middle of
a vast room. Richie sleeps in the tent, listening to the Rolling
Stones on the same breed of chunky gray record player we all
remember from grade school. Now and then a "dalmatian mouse"
-- Chas's invention -- scampers into the frame, as if blotted
with memories, or symbolic of memories blotted out. Why,
we might ask, did Royal emphasize Margot's adopted status
at every opportunity? Why was he ejected from his home (the movie
never says)? Is Richie's affection for Margot a case of like-father-like-son?
Underneath the film's ornate but terse facade might be a churning
tangle of backstories barely hinted at.
Gene Hackman presides over
all this like a dissipated King Lear, only he doesn't demand
expressions of love from his three children; he'll make do with
expressions of non-hatred. The Royal Tenenbaums extends
or plays with themes explored in Rushmore: in both, a
father looks quizzically at offspring he can't imagine he could
have sired, and a protagonist is an immature liar and often dislikable,
but somehow, despite himself, lovable. Tenenbaums can
also be considered a loose sequel to Rushmore, in that
the three past-their-prime wunderkinder could be Max Fischer
fifteen years on. If you didn't float happily in the world of
Rushmore, this movie's mix of quirky humor and deadpan
anguish won't do it for you (I noted a number of walkouts at
the screening I attended). Anderson specializes in gentle bipolar
comedy-tragedies: Tenenbaums may be the most depressive
movie ever to be painted in shades of red, yellow, and pink.
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