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DOWSE movie guide review of Royal Tenenbaums

The Royal Tenenbaums
Director: Wes Anderson
review by Charles Glicksman

Most films shot in New York city are best remembered for scenes which highlight the city’s larger than life aesthetic. From the Staypuft Marshmallow Man’s Godzilla-like destruction of gotham in Ghostbusters, to the romantic notion of meeting a true love for the first time on top of the Empire State Building (An Affair to Remember, Sleepless in Seattle), New York City is that rarest of film locations that seconds as a main character. The big apple is an amalgam of the hustle and bustle of a metropolis while evoking deeply personal stories that seem universal to all eight million people aboard Manhattan island.
   Contrary to this trend, the New York depicted in Wes Anderson’s delightfully quirky, dysfunctional family saga, The Royal Tenenbaums, is completely fictional and bears little resemblance to the city depicted in other productions. Movies in New York city have become synonymous with names like Woody, Scorsese, Spike Lee and Mike Nichols. In these cinematic standards, the city is a forceful presence, every bit as resonant and affective as a human character. Not so with Anderson’s new vehicle. Anderson’s New York bears no resemblance to Scorsese’s mean streets or Allen’s obsessional, neurotic love affair with eight million possibilities. Anderson’s New York is a magical menagerie of posh urbanism and stylistic entrapment, at once a slice of a developmentally arrested family, isolated from the yellow cabs and rushed atmosphere of the big apple.
   The Royal Tenenbaums is indelibly a Wes Anderson film. With his two previous efforts (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore; both co-written with Owen Wilson), Anderson has developed into a filmmaker with a singular vision. His heroes are vulnerable to trauma and heartache. Characters do not necessarily climb out of their despair, but usually learn to live with their faults. Anderson is an obsessively complicated filmmaker, using intricate sets and production designs to describe characters in ways that words always seem to fall short.
   The plot follows Royal Tenenbaum, a garish patriarch who wants a second chance at playing husband and father to the family he so easily discarded 17 years ago. He falsely claims he is dying, expecting his family to take him back. His older children are ambivalent to his announcement of his upcoming death. Either they don’t believe him or they don’t really care.
   Gene Hackman (inexplicably left off the nominations for Best Actor) portrays Tenenbaum in a performance of comedic manipulation and unintentional sentimentality. Royal needs his children, but damned if he will ever admit it. Instead, his actions paved the way for their painful development from childhood to adult dysfuntion.
   As children, the Tenenbaums were lauded for their talents and labeled ‘geniuses’ by the neighborhood elite. As adults, we discover that all have been terribly affected by Royal's neglect; as they are unable to deal with the stresses of life. Regardless of how smart they were, it could not save them from the pain and disconnectedness brought upon by a pitiless father.
   There is Chas (Ben Stiller in a brilliantly understated performance), a business guru before his tenth birthday, with a fondness for wearing running suits, appearing sadder and more depressed than his attire. Richie (Luke Wilson in a career making performance) was a Bjorn Borg-like tennis prodigy, who blew a gasket in a championship match, opting to sail the world while keeping his distance from his family and his overwhelming feelings for his stepsister Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow). The only adoptee of the tribe (Royal introduces her at parties by stating "This is my adopted daughter Margot") she was a child playwright, who received her most scathing review from her father ("The characters weren’t believable") She was 10. Paltrow plays Margot as a sullen, depressive, chain-smoking princess, while Stiller embodies the pain and torment of a paranoid father. He not only lost his wife in a plane accident, but also his father, who is still, very much alive.
   Ultimately, this film belongs to Luke Wilson, and Hackman. Wilson has been in some forgettable films (Home Fries, Blue Streak), but he sinks his teeth into this part with understated intensity, never able to handle his emotions, which eventually leads to an impulsive decision. But this is really Hackman’s film and he continues to amaze even into his seventies. His turn as Royal Tenenbaum evokes the wish that parents have to pass a competency exam before having children, while applauding his efforts for attempting a reconciliation. He is a contradictory character of the highest order. We love him yet want to kill him.
   Anderson is a major talent who is shining brighter and brighter with each picture. While his sets have the feel of contrived boxes of painstakingly crafted art pieces, he lets his actors loose within these parameters. The screenplay is a clever affair, depicting a painful portrait of a troubled family.
   Anderson, like David Lynch or the Coen Brothers, utilise quirky, peripheral characters who add volumes without sacrificing style or substance. There’s Pagoda (Kumar Pallana), the family butler and Royal’s personal confidant. How they met is a typical Andersonian device, devastatingly amusing and fantastically moronic. How about Bill Murray, who seems so comfortable playing in Anderson’s magical worlds, as a neuroscientist, creating a theory based on one teenage subject.
   Anderson’s magnificent visions are complemented by the musical companions which grace his poetic scenes. Collaborating with Mark Mothersbaugh for the third time, the soundtrack is a mixture of alternative underground despair (Velvet Underground, Nico), blistering three-chord punk (The Ramones, The Clash) and Motherbaughs stylish compositions of controlled idiosyncrasy.
   Few directors have the ability to accurately utilize music to convey the perfect blend of mood and understatement. When it works, music can supercede its place in the background and deliver a statement every bit as powerful as the spoken word. In Scorsese’s Goodfellas, his use of Eric Clapton’s coda to ‘Layla’ encapsulated the demise of the Henry Hill gang, an aching reminder that nothing would ever be the same again. Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, opened with the Rolling Stone’s ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, as a metaphor for unrealised potential, during a funeral for a successful suicide. These moments (along with countless others) are indelibly imprinted into our consciousness; one scene ultimately incomplete without the accompanying music. In Rushmore, Anderson used this technique to perfection by blending forgotten 1960s and 1970s era rock nuggets as a means of expressing the timelessness of his story. I was cheering when Hackman teaches his grandsons the meaning of life through shoplifting, throwing water balloons at passing automobiles and crossing against traffic, while Simon and Garfunkal’s 'Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard' resonates like an old friend.
   It’s hard to laugh at dysfunction, especially when the source is your own father. But really, isn’t this supposed to be funny? What isn’t comically absurd about how some parents treat their children. This absurdity is converted into a comedy of basic faults and how to appreciate and acknowledge that second chances are not always granted. The Tenenbaum children don’t care as much if Royal gets it right, but that he just gets it.

Charles Glicksman

DOWSE Guide to the Movies is compiled by Tony Lee editor of Pigasus Press
You can order videos and DVD releases reviewed on these pages at Blackstar

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