The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Director: Wes Anderson

The wife and I have found ourselves unintentionally revisiting Wes Anderson's film catalog. It started with watching The Darjeeling Limited a couple weeks back, then continued with Rushmore last week. Having enjoyed those two, we kept it up with his follow-up to that latter film, and enjoyed it plenty.

The Royal Tenenbaums uses an impressive ensemble cast to follow the Tenenbaum family, a New York City-based clan which includes Royal, the self-involved, insensitive father; Etheline, a loving mother, and three budding genius children: Chas, Margot, and Richie. While the Tenenbaum kids all seem to be headed for greatness in their respective fields of interest - finance, playwrighting, and tennis - the dysfunction within the family (mostly due to their father) eventually derails nearly everyone's chance at great success. We mostly follow the children a little over two decades after they were all between roughly eight and eleven years old and still showed limitless promise. At this point, Royal, now completely broke and desperate but no better a human being, concocts a scheme to work his way back into his wife and children's lives.

This is the Wes Anderson movie I know best, having watched it every few years since it came out, and I still think it's pretty great.

The Royal Tenenbaums was the first film of Wes Anderson's to expand to the large-group ensemble approach. After his smaller-scale (and smaller-budgeted) films Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, we now got a story that juggles no less than a half-dozen major characters and their bizarre and dysfunctional relationships with each other. If there is any primary character, it is the titular Royal, played hilariously by Gene Hackman. His gruff, unforgiving turn as the thoughtless, selfish, destructive patriarch of the Tenenbaum family sets and keeps much of the rest of the story in motion. It's not always easy - not even in comedy - to create a character who's mostly despicable, but whom you ultimately empathize with. At least a little bit, anyway.

But the movie is more than just Hackman as the unfit, previously-absentee father. The all-star cast all live up the reputations that had either previously created and/or have since maintained. Anjelica Huston is as good as she's ever been, which is saying something. No surprise there. But the younger players - Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke and Owen Wilson, Danny Glover, Bill Murray, and others - are inhabit their quirky and damaged characters splendidly.

In an attempt to bond, Royal brings his newly-acquainted
grandsons to a dog-fighting circle. Perfect example his
insanely misguided (but hilarious) attempts to reconnect with
a family whom he himself drove off with this type of thing.

This movie was also the one which I consider the first of what the movie-going world would come to know as "the Wes Anderson movie." While we saw it almost fully formed in Rushmore, it is with The Royal Tenenbaums that we get the hyper-detailed, meticulously-crafted, super vibrant visuals and ultra-sharp cinematography in each and every shot and movement. It's not to everyone's taste, as it shatters any illusion that you're watching reality, and it can have a cartoonish feel to it. But for those who appreciate an eye for visual details, it's hard not to be impressed. The impeccable quality has been a part of every single film - both live action and animated - that he's done since, and this was really the one which set his own bar.

All technical merits aside, the movie is still just plain funny. Hackman delivers Royal's brutally insensitive lines and needling to perfection. The Wilson brothers bring their penchant for playing zoned out, sensitive types fully into Eli Nash and Richie Tenenbaum. The rest of the cast is just as good, and they're all given plenty of hilariously odd situations that actually don't seem too far off the detached, near-aristocratic pursuits of New York elite types. As with nearly every Anderson movie, it does take a brief, dark turn that's difficult to anticipate, but the proceedings never get overly bleak. There is heart and dysfunction aplenty, but this is, overall, a comedy.

I still rank this one among my favorite Wes Anderson films. I've generally liked them all to varying degrees, but The Royal Tenenbaums is in my top two or three. Along with Rushmore, it's the Anderson movie I would recommend to someone who hasn't seen any of his. From either one of those, you'll know if he's to your liking.