This is a film with an ensemble cast about a dysfunctional family. Gene Hackman plays Royal Tenenbaum, the father of the family, who left home many years before and has been living in a hotel ever since. His estranged wife Etheline (Anjelica Huston) remains at home with their three children. They were all child prodigies and have since grown into adult failures. Chas (Ben Stiller) was a financial genius; Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), who was adopted, was a young playwright, and Richie (Luke Wilson) was once a tennis champion. The Tenenbaums are reunited when Royal fakes cancer because he wants to spend more time with his family.The film is narrated extremely effectively by a deadpan Alec Baldwin from a fictional biographical book and there are good performances from other actors (Owen Wilson, Danny Glover) the most memorable of which is Bill Murray as Raleigh St. Clair, Margot’s husband, a bearded intellectual carrying out psychological tests on a young boy named Dudley Heinsbergen. There is also Pagoda, Royal’s servant who, in India, stabbed Royal and then rescued him from himself.
In The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Stanley Cavell wrote that ‘a believable family has seemed as hard to get on film as a believable intellectual or university classroom’. The Royal Tenenbaums appears to acknowledge this fact and take it to the extreme. The characters and relationships in the film are strangely two-dimensional. Indeed, there is an odd flatness to the entire plot. This, however, is not a criticism; I found one of the most entertaining and interesting aspects of the film to be the way it keeps the viewer uncertain about how exactly we should be reacting to moments of tragedy. Wes Anderson’s directing style also complements the quirky nature of the film brilliantly. The camera’s quick pans and zooms (also used to such effect in Anderson’s later film The Life Aquatic (2004)) have an engaging and eccentric feel to them. While the odd and subtle humour of Anderson’s films may not appeal to everyone, I found The Royal Tenenbaums to be a highly original and wonderfully quirky yet touching film.
