Flak Magazine: Review of The Royal Tenenbaums, 1-03-01

The worst kind of snobbery is guilt by association. "You are what you like" is the most ill-informed, the most immature, the most chauvinistic form of criticism imaginable. You do not cease to be a respectable, thinking human being because you enjoy beer-cheese soup, rock out to witless early '90s techno or think "Ulysses" was a bundle of ridiculous hoo-hah for pointy-headed grad students.

Therefore, it's truly painful to say that anyone who dislikes The Royal Tenenbaums is a stump-licking disgrace to the very notion of human free will. But that doesn't make it any less true. With The Royal Tenenbaums, Director Wes Anderson has scored a hit as solid as his 1998 work, Rushmore.

The qualities that make Anderson's films so intoxicatingly powerful to their fans are the same properties that inspire confusion and loathing in the director's many enemies. In Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, his characters are nuanced to the point of being cinematic miniatures of real human beings. The specific books, quotes and incidents that change their lives are laid out with exacting geometric precision. Yet few of the events that alter their worlds fit into neat boxes. The men, women and children of Anderson's little world are strange and undeniably human. With the help of co-writer Owen Wilson, Anderson has created people who evolve, fight and fascinate. They smash their fists through the borders we think they occupy.

Setting the film in a New York City filled with quiet streets and taxis marked with "Gypsy Cab Company" logos, Anderson masterfully evokes a timeless, mythic urban landscape that is at once unobtrusive and reminiscent of classic children's storybooks like "Eloise" or "Madeline." Against this backdrop, The Royal Tenenbaums explores members of a strikingly dysfunctional family dominated by three siblings once hailed as child geniuses, but now recognizable as deeply screwed-up adults.

Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), an accomplished playwright by the ninth grade, spends her days locked in a bathroom, smoking and avoiding her overly solicitous husband (Bill Murray). Richie (Luke Wilson), a former tennis champion, travels for a year on a cruise ship nursing a broken heart. Chas (Ben Stiller), a financial whiz, becomes excessively safety-conscious following his wife's death in a plane crash. Watching over them all with a loving, albeit distracted, gaze is their mother, Etheline (Angelica Huston).

Abandoned by their irresponsible and dying father Royal (played with bluff, irresistible force by Gene Hackman), they must decide whether to forgive a man who didn't care about them until the damage was already done. Royal's wish to see his family together again might be a trivial thing to many American families, but for the Tenenbaums, it's enough to trigger an avalanche of domestic chaos.

In the background of this seemingly innocuous redemption tale, a dozen other stories are brewing: a family friend struggling with fame and drug addiction. A semi-incestuous infatuation. A sudden nervous breakdown. A destructive affair. The growing love of a mature couple. Each plays off of and magnifies the other, creating a kaleidoscope of human pain and comedy.

Anderson is funny — sweetly, uproariously, consistently funny, which is probably the only thing that keeps the acid with which he etches his characters from consuming them completely. Few films uncork the liberating, transcendent power of laughter with as much skill and timing as The Royal Tenenbaums. Rushmore is certainly another. Annie Hall comes to mind, as do High Fidelity and Harold and Maude.

Within this film there is plenty to grieve over — one character's suicide attempt is a dark and potentially devastating moment, leavened with absurdity. Laying in an emergency room, another character asks the would-be corpse if his suicide note was dark. "Of course it's dark. It's a suicide note," he replies. In a more sunny scene, Margot and Royal are out for ice cream. Rebuffing his attempts at acting fatherly, she asks if he knows her middle name. "That's a trick question. You don't have a middle name," Royal replies, and the audience laughs, only to have the moment turn poignant as Margot parries back with "Helen." "That was my mother's name," muses Royal, and the joke, still reverberating, has turned into a second of genuine closeness between father and daughter.

It's this exquisite and subtle layering that makes The Royal Tenenbaums such an accomplishment for Anderson, and makes the movie so difficult to grasp. Much attention has been paid to the quirkiness of this film — for instance, each character has a costume of sorts, Margot wearing a Lacoste polo shirt dress and mink coat throughout, Chas a red jogging suit — and it is possible to be distracted from the real significance of the story by trying to sort out the meaning or symbolism of such affectations. But to appreciate The Royal Tenenbaums is not to try to decode it; it's not a puzzle. Only focusing not on what these various signifiers mean, but instead on what they provoke in you while watching the movie, is it possible to become wrapped up in the finely wrought and nuanced lives of the people who inhabit Anderson's world.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com) and

— Jessica Chapel (jnc at flakmag dot com)