The Royal Tenenbaums
rated R
now playing at UA North Creek

By Sean Chadwell

I want to begin by crediting Bill Nichols with the Laredo appearance of The Royal Tenenbaums. In his January review of Vanilla Sky for LareDOS, Nichols challenged the Laredo cinema establishment (I'm guessing that this is a humorless patrón-style organization committed to profit in insipidness) to bring some non-mainstream films to town. He specifically requested The Royal Tenenbaums.
Thanks, Bill.
Royal Tenenbaums is the third film by director Wes Anderson and writer Owen Wilson; their last project, Rushmore (1998), was imaginative, surprising, and darkly funny. This one is even better.
In Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson and Wilson continue exploring -- in their darkly comic way -- some favorite themes and motifs; the most obvious of these is precociousness: the three sibling characters in this film, Chas, Margot, and Richie (Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Luke Wilson), were all child prodigies, despite their father Royal's (Gene Hackman) paternal shortcomings. As adults, these characters struggle against the realization that they are not, after all, sums of their precocious parts. Instead, they now have their own shortcomings, perhaps exacerbated by the promise they once held, and (as in Rushmore) they realize that they may be ultimately responsible for these.
This all sounds fairly serious. But among Anderson's gifts is his ability somehow to get us to laugh at the existential angst of his characters lives . . . or maybe I'm thinking of his ability to dignify the darkly comic absurdity of his characters' lives. I always get these mixed up.
He does these things, in part, as a filmmaker: the introduction of the movie is a series of quirky, quickly-cut introductions to the family and each of the three children (and childhood friend Eli Cash -- played by Owen Wilson). The voice-over narrator (Alec Baldwin), for example, explains that as a child, Chas raised "dalmation mice" for a profit while we watch the young Chas selecting a conservative tie from a motorized rack. But even after the introduction, the characters are more caricature than human (Richie Tenenbaum, who has become a tennis star, is always costumed in tennis garb).
When the film's story begins, Royal Tenenbaum is being thrown out of his hotel (after having lived there for years) and pretends to want to reconnect with his family. What he really wants, we infer, is a place to stay. His children react to him in various ways, from outright hostility (Chas), to overt resentment (Margot, who was never allowed to forget she was adopted), to pathetic acceptance (Richie). The three Tenenbaums also, now, have adult issues which have driven them back home for a brief sojourn.
The film is edited and scored in light-hearted ways; it frequently feels like an Errol Morris documentary: characters are left before the camera to say something revealing and often ridiculous. Books figure prominently as a structuring device (the film is roughly divided into chapters; at the beginning of each, we're shown the corresponding pages of the book, describing the scene we're about to see). Music -- the film is scored, as was Rushmore by Mark Mothersbaugh -- is also used extensively and well, here, to provide the film with a bittersweet ambiance.
The sum effect of all of this is a film whose aural and visual imaginativeness are droll (if, admittedly, urbane) and genuinely pleasing to look at and listen to (I'll admit, however, that my own response to Wes Anderson can best be described as giddy anticipation: the previews before the film are like so much scrapped wrapping paper at Christmas).
All of this may have the effect of making Anderson's approach to his characters seem less than sincere; but, unlike Joel and Ethan Coen (Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou?), who are often accused of looking down upon their characters (caricatures?), Anderson manages, finally, to encourage us to understand their fallibility -- often funny, here, but sometimes wrenching -- as something deeply human. Even the incredibly self-centered Royal seems warm and human at the end of this film. Like Rushmore, the film feels sardonic and detached, at first, but is in fact quite intimate and sentimental. And quite good.

(Sean Chadwell is a professor of English at Texas A&M International University.)