December 14, 2001 | In the world according to The Royal Tenenbaums – the very best movie of 2001 – genius is a profoundly mixed blessing, and the only thing worse than being part of a dysfunctional family is being shut out of one.
Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman), a roguish disbarred lawyer with a mischievous twinkle in his eye and no sense of shame whatsoever, seeks reconciliation with his long estranged wife, Etheline (Angelica Huston), and their three children, former child prodigies who have grown into discontent, disappointed adults. After nearly two decades, however, Etheline – who raised the kids more or less on her own, for better or worse, and now finds fulfillment as an urban archaeologist – doesn’t really want Royal in her life, much less in the spacious brownstone they once shared.
But Royal is determined to worm his way into his family’s good graces. (He’s even more determined to worm his way back into that brownstone, since he’s recently been ejected from a residential hotel for non-payment of rent.) And so, faced with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle on the shortcut to happiness, he responds with characteristic ingenuity: He lies through his teeth. Specifically, he claims to be dying of cancer. Deeply touched, but not altogether appeased, Etheline allows him to move into a spare bedroom of Chez Tenenbaum, just before their three children, for varying reasons, decide to move back home.
Richie (Luke Wilson), an ace tennis player since his grade school days, attained sports-world superstardom by winning the U.S. Nationals three years in a row. But his star faded after an embarrassing meltdown during a championship match. He just couldn’t keep his mind on his game, because of unrequited love for Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), his adopted sister. Strictly speaking, we’re not talking about incest here. Even so, “It’s still frowned upon,” Royal notes. Then, after a nanosecond’s second thought, the feckless father adds: “But what isn’t, these days?”
(The line is very clever, but Hackman’s smile makes it laugh-out-loud hilarious.)
Margot, a promising playwright in her youth, never quite fulfilled that early promise. Indeed, she stopped trying a long time ago, much to the dismay of her anxious husband (Bill Murray), and now spends most of her spare time in either her bathtub or some other man’s bed. Her current lover is a childhood friend, Eli Cash (Owen Wilson, Luke’s bother), who has grown up, sort of, to be a gonzo-stoner author of Cormac McCarthy-style Western novels. Eli has always wanted to be part of the Tenenbaum family and, much like Royal himself, he will exploit any advantage, including his own celebrity, to gain entry to their seemingly charmed circle. “You wouldn’t give me the time of day,” he tells Margot, “until I started getting good reviews.” “You’re reviews aren’t that good,” Margot counters. “Yeah,” Eli agrees, wistfully. “But my sales are.”
Richie and Margot are, at best, ambivalent about being reunited under the same roof with their errant father. (Margot can’t help remembering how, throughout her childhood, Royal thoughtlessly and repeatedly introduced her as “my adopted daughter.”) But they don’t openly hate the old guy. The same cannot be said of Chas (Ben Stiller), their brother, a widowed investment whiz who’s determined to be more responsible, protective and just plain fatherly than Royal ever was. His two young sons aren’t exactly overjoyed to be receiving so much smothering attention. Indeed, when pressed on the subject by their jovially irresponsible grandfather, they admit Chas is more than a tiny bit paranoid. But, then again, Chas learned to expect the worst at a very early age: Royal used to embezzle money from his bank accounts.
Narrated with slyly understated bemusement by Alec Baldwin, The Royal Tenenbaums is a wonderfully loopy fable infused with equal measures of whimsy and melancholy. It was directed by Wes Anderson, who co-wrote the script with co-star Owen Wilson, and knowing that will give you some idea of what to expect, provided that you have seen the previous Anderson-Wilson collaboration, the lyrically off-beat Rushmore.
Like Rushmore, but even more so, Tenenbaums mixes straight-faced absurdity with unaffected sincerity. Much of its considerable charm stems from its playful unpredictability. (A couple of scenes that teeter on the brink of tragedy suddenly – impishly, with just a hint of a wink – summersault into something else.) But, again like Rushmore, it also demonstrates a generosity of spirit that is even more endearing than the eccentricities of its plot. Characters behave selfishly, or make total fools of themselves, and yet they remain immensely likable. You laugh — frequently, heartily – as they maneuver through their misadventures. But you also care a great deal about them, and wish the best for them.
The individual performances are at once splendidly diverse and all of a piece, which is another way of saying that, if they gave out Academy Awards for Best Ensemble, everyone on screen here would be clutching a gold statuette next spring. Billy Murray doesn’t have nearly enough to do as Raleigh, Margot’s cuckolded husband, and Danny Glover has even less as Henry Sherman, Etheline’s fastidious accountant and suitor. But both actors make valuable contributions to the mix, enhancing the terrific work by more prominent players such as Paltrow and the Owens brothers. If Gene Hackman emerges as first among equals – well, hey, he is Gene Hackman. And he’s at the top of his form in a shrewd and subtle performance as a wastrel who wants to make amends for all the wrong reasons and quite a few of the right ones.
Production designer David Wasco (another Rushmore alumnus) and cinematographer Robert Yeoman give Tenenbaums a meticulously stylized look of gone-to-seed grandeur, using vaguely anachronistic props – hi-fis, rotary telephones, rusting gypsy cabs that are helpfully labeled “Gypsy Cabs” — to hint that time stopped somewhere in the late ‘70s, perhaps on the very day that Royal took leave of his family. The movie is rooted in something like the real world, yet not so firmly that any flights of fancy are impeded.
