Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums is richly layered as a wedding cake-- level after level of confectionery subtly sweetened and deftly whipped follow one after another, with baroque curlicues of icing ornamenting the edges. Not to everyone’s taste and I don’t quite like it as much as his previous Rushmore-- you felt as if you could actually have known the people in that movie. But for those who enjoy lightly sugared nonsense leavened with tart wit (as opposed to the thick syrup that passes for romantic comedy nowadays) and imagination, this is a feast.
The Tenenbaum children number three: Chas (Ben Stiller) is the business prodigy-- made an early fortune creating Dalmatian mice; Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) wrote full-length plays; Richie (Luke Wilson) became a tennis star. All of them were child geniuses, having reached the pinnacle of their respective careers roughly about the time they reached the pinnacle of their adolescence-- after which it’s all downhill, more or less.
The shaping event of their life was the departure of their father, Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) who at one point lets slip that his many infidelities caused his wife and their mother Etheline (Anjelica Huston-- real starstudded cast here) to ask him to leave. Many years later Etheline is thinking of marrying her accountant Henry Sherman (Danny Glover) and Royal, upon hearing the news, decides it’s time to come back to the family… which is about the time when things really hit the fan.
Anderson tells the story like a modern-day urban fairy-tale; he divides the film into chapters, introduces each chapter with a voiceover (by Alec Baldwin, who occasionally sounds uncannily like Gene Hackman-- makes you wonder if this was accidental).
Anderson achieves a look and tone difficult to describe, its reality askew yet muted, its colors garish yet tastefully used, its music offbeat same time it sounds old-fashioned. You’re reminded of the Coen brothers and their odder comedies-- the brightlit Raising Arizona, the amiably bizarre The Big Liebowski, but Anderson (who co-wrote the script with Owen Wilson) doesn’t quite show the same mixture of cynicism or formal brilliance. You feel the two shape things more intuitively, have more ready affection for their characters (hence the lack of any real villains in their films). And there are moments of knotted human emotions that you feel the Coen brothers could never achieve (or don’t bother to try).
There are some juicy anachronisms to ponder over-- like tombstones of recent deaths showing us the years 2000 and 2001 respectively, though little in the film feels contemporary. Many of the cars are from the fifties (a battered old gray cab keeps popping up like a running joke that refuses to die), the buildings are from the ‘30s, the costumes from all over-- Stiller wears a modern-day jogging suit while Hackman looks almost resplendent in a fuzzy bellhop uniform complete with working elevator cage (you can’t help being startled when he whips out a cellphone). The locations look and feel like New York sometime before the Second World War-- there are shots where we could be looking down at a Central Park more forest than park, and the skyline has one strangely-shaped rooftop (the design reminding me of Da Vinci’s aerial screw) too many. Actually, the locations are real-- Anderson shot around Harlem, Forest Hills in Queens, Park Slope in Brooklyn, and Jersey City; it’s Anderson’s and Wilson’s sensibilities that make everything seem off-kilter.
It would be accurate I think to call what Anderson and Wilson are doing a juggling act-- they toss in whatever they thought might be amusing, and keep it all in the air through sheer force of whimsy; only later do you realize that things actually make sense. No one is willing to admit this, but Royal’s departure put the family into a tailspin from which they never really recover-- Margot stopped writing plays, Richie choked up on the tennis court during a televised match, Chas spent much of his adult life trying to destroy Royal. If the Tenenbaums’ world looks as if they had been stranded by some time-warp in the past, that’s because they were-- they’ve been waiting for their father to catch up ever since. The whole thing shouldn’t cohere-- should really be flying apart in a thousand different directions-- if it weren’t for the conviction of the performers that this all actually works. Stiller and Paltrow do some of their best recent work here: Stiller’s psycho yapping-dog intensity perfectly suggest Chas’ bewildered fury at his father’s behavior, while Paltrow’s heavily linered eyes and pallor give Margot the haunted quality of a woman wandering endlessly in search of peace. Luke Wilson adds to the film’s lost-in-time quality with his Ancient Mariner of the Tennis Courts act-- he looks as if he hadn’t shaved since his last match, and when he finally does shave, the pained Frog-Prince sensitivity that comes through is perfect, the snipped-off hair falling away like a magic curse. Danny Glover as the courtly but nevertheless intelligent Henry Sherman and Bill Murray as the clueless Raleigh St. Claire (his scenes where he tries to create out of thin air a mental case history that can tour the talk show circuit is classic) round off the cast.
Royal Tenenbaum has been called a bastard and worse, by friends and family alike, and it’s all true, yet you can’t help feeling for the cad-- he means well in his myopically selfish way, and has a charm you simply can’t shake off. Hackman has always been good in comedies (he was the high point as a blind hermit lighting The Creature’s thumb in Young Frankenstein); Royal is perhaps his fullest comic role in a long career, and he goes to town with it.
I’d point out three elements out of hundreds about Hackman in this movie, the third best being his generosity-- he makes everyone he interacts with look good. His scenes with Anjelica Huston as his wife Etheline have the familiar yet frazzled quality of two people who know each other inside out and hate it (Huston has the smaller role, but she’s the rock Hackman stands on and occasionally dashes against). The second would be the incredible ease with which he pulls his performances off-- he takes Anderson’s complex, ungainly movie and wears it lightly on his shoulders, like a velvet cape, and it sits perfectly. Finally, there’s his grip-- he holds tight to the secret core of Royal’s character, holds it, and holds it, until it practically has to be pried from him. When this happens-- in a series of quiet, almost throwaway moments-- he gives the film an emotional force you wonder if Anderson or Wilson had ever planned for it seems so, well, unplanned. Hackman deserves the 'Royal' moniker all right; at the moment he reigns as king of Hollywood character actors-- has been reigning, in fact, for years.
First published in Businessworld, 3.14.02
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