Tenebaums: Non-Stop Laugh Riot: Viraj Patel Reviews 'The Royal Tenenbaums'

By Viraj Patel | Monday, January 21, 2002

'The Royal Tenenbaums' redeems all the predictability and convention that Hollywood threw at us with its unremarkable spate of movies last year.

Consider just the setup that the movie gives us in its opening sequence. In storybook fashion a la tableaux vivants with voiceover narration, we learn the history of the dysfunctional Tenenbaum family. Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman), the patriarch of a great family of wunderkinder, becomes estranged from his wife Etheline (Anjelica Huston) after she discovered that he had been unfaithful. When Royal breaks it to his three kids that he and their mother are separating, they innocently ask if it was their fault. Royal responds heartlessly, though honestly, 'Well, obviously we had to make certain sacrifices when we had you, but no. Lord no.'

So Etheline is left to raise her three precocious children who have yet to reach their teens, and at first she seems to be doing a remarkable job. Richie Tenenbaum (Luke Wilson), who is first seen stringing his own tennis racket, becomes a world class tennis star. Chas (Ben Stiller), whose office bookshelf is lined with archived copies of Forbes Magazine, finds great success in a business he starts selling a breed of Dalmatian mice he invented. Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), by the age of nine, has produced an award-winning play.

But still things go wrong, perhaps the surfacing of an effect their father's absence has on them.

During a crucial match at the U.S. Open, Richie breaks down on court. He is seen on TV without his shoes and, wearing only one sock, and as the camera moves in on his face, he pouts. A sports commentator asks incredulously, 'Is he crying?' His career-wrecking loss is described on the front cover of Sports Illustrated: 'Meltdown!'

Chas becomes a high-roller as his Dalmatian mice business continues to thrive, but after his wife dies in an accident, he becomes foul-tempered and emotionally distant. He also develops an obsessive protectiveness over his twins Ari and Uzi most clearly evidenced by his requirement that they always wear the same red Adidas warm-up suit as he does—presumably, so that they could spot each other in a crowd.

Margot stopped writing plays, and, since marrying the famous if disreputable psychoanalyst Raleigh St. Clair (Bill Murray), spends most of her days languishing in her bathroom behind a locked door smoking cigarettes, a habit she has managed to hide from her husband and family since she was twelve.

Meanwhile, Royal, who has since retired from his lucrative career as a lawyer, dwells at the posh Lindbergh Hotel where he has been living for the past twenty-two years.

More crises in their lives develop, and the Tenenbaum children end up back at the large Victorian house in which they grew up. And they stay there mostly because of a story made up by the now penniless and thus Lindbergh hotel-less Royal to get Etheline to allow him to stay in the house again—that he has a form of cancer that has left him with only six weeks to live.

In 'The Royal Tenenbaums,' as well as in his previous two movies Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, director and writer Wes Anderson gives us his own brand of comic absurdism. His characters and plot setups taunt Hollywood, 'I dare you to be this weird.' And maybe by the third time the idea might start to get a little tiresome if it were not for Anderson's mastery of deadpan comedy and the sheer hilarity of scene after scene in this movie. If for no other reason, watch this movie to see Gene Hackman, after asking Ari and Uzi about their mother and learning of her death, respond with utter earnestness and geniality, 'I'm sorry for your loss...she was a very attractive woman.'

Part of Anderson's secret lies in his creation of characters that can't be categorized as a type. There are no heroes or villains in Anderson's film or clear delineation between who is good and who is evil. His characters, though often eccentric, are real people who, even if flawed, always have some redeemable virtues. Even the narcissistic and unfeeling Royal, who never hesitated to remind Margot as a child that she was adopted and not a real Tenenbaum, who forgets that Chas is a widower and insensitively suggests that the family swing by her house for a visit, comes through in the end when he pleads to his children after they discover the true nature of his illness: 'These last six days have been the best days of my life.' Even though he doesn't mean these words when he says them, an important revelation comes to him shortly after: 'Only moments after saying those words did I realize that it was true.' That split moment of genuine affection in Royal is a triumph of the human spirit. And that encouraging optimism is what the movie boils down to—that if there is hope for Royal then there is hope for everyone.

Tenebaums: Non-Stop Laugh Riot: Viraj Patel Reviews 'The Royal Tenenbaums'

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