The Royal Tenenbaums

Love—the real-life kind, not the kind in the movies—is messy. Writer/director Wes Anderson likes to take on messy themes. They’re messy because they are things we think we pretty much already understand—love, friendship, loyalty, and loneliness—but we come away from movies like The Royal Tenenbaums not so sure. It’s a more successful version of Anderson’s earlier films Bottle Rocket and Rushmore—the inevitable and ineffable awkwardness of relationships between family, friends, and lovers—a kind, sad, and funny film that praises effort rather than results.

It’s the story of the Tenenbaum clan, an extended family of eccentrics, misfits, and failed child prodigies. Royal Tenenbaum (played by Gene Hackman) is the family’s manipulative, estranged patriarch, who returns to the family home after he’s evicted from the hotel he’s lived in for years. Royal loves his family, but has no idea of how to show them he loves them. In spite of this, he sets about trying to win them back, conning his way back into the house by faking a fatal illness. Meanwhile, Etheline (Anjelica Huston), to whom Royal is still legally married, is considering a proposal from Henry Sherman (Danny Glover), who after 10 years as Etheline’s accountant, is finally able to speak of his feelings for her.

Royal and Etheline’s three children are all prodigies gone wrong. Chas (Ben Stiller), a Wall Street financial genius since grade school, survives a plane crash that kills his wife and becomes obsessed with insuring the safety, welfare, and proper rearing of his two sons. When the fire protection system in his apartment fails to function to his expectation, he and his boys return to his mother’s house so that repairs can be made.

Margot Tenenbaum (Gwyneth Paltrow), the adopted daughter, has had a successful writing career since winning a prize for a school play she wrote. As an adult, she is so neurotic she’s able to do little else than soak in a bathtub, smoke cigarettes, and watch TV. Her husband, Raleigh St. Clair (Bill Murray) understands her work, but not her, and loves her anyway, but (like Royal) can’t express it, which is exactly what drives Margot back home to her mother’s house. Richie (Luke Wilson) was a Bjorn Borg-esque professional tennis star who self-destructed during one of his biggest matches, and now sails around the world on a freighter, mostly staring blankly at the horizon. Eli Cash (Owen Wilson) lived next door to the Tenenbaums as a boy, and became a sort of honorary Tenenbaum over the years. He now writes poorly reviewed but bestselling Western novels, dresses in full Western wear, and has developed a drug habit. As they all come together in the family home, all the grievances are aired, and they begin to break down each other’s carefully-constructed barriers and start to sort through who really feels how about whom.

With all the Tenenbaums’ unique superficial flaws and weirdness, it would have been easy to turn the film into a farce, or into a Jim Carrey movie. Anderson doesn’t do that. What The Royal Tenenbaums is interested in is the genuine everyday human strangeness beneath the characters’ surfaces, and how they come to recognize (and eventually accept or reject) this strangeness in the people they love. Anderson (who co-writes his films with best friend Owen Wilson) is careful to balance the emotional weights of the characters. Although the film is often funny, even silly, it frequently balances its humor with sadness, with unfinished thoughts and unarticulated feelings. It’s rare that a film portrays both with equal vigor and sympathy, as The Royal Tenenbaums does.

--Matt Parks