It
says something very revealing about either The Royal Tenenbaums or myself (or,
of course, both) that I went to it, laughed some, cried a little, and came out
generally lukewarm about the movie.It
says something very revealing about either The Royal Tenenbaums or myself (or,
of course, both) that I went to it, laughed some, cried a little, and came out
generally lukewarm about the movie.
The third film by the team of writer-director Wes Anderson, writer-actor Owen Wilson and actor-brother Luke Wilson (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore) seems somehow more precise and less exact than the other two films. The Royal Tenenbaums is about a family of child geniuses grown up (Gwenyth Paltrow, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson) and snared in psychological quagmires, and the distant father (Gene Hackman) who decides to re-enter the family twenty years after he left. There is also the geniuses' mother (Angelica Huston) and her suitor (Danny Glover), Stiller's children, Paltrow's husband (Bill Murray) and his test patient, and the childhood friend next door who's grown up to become a literary celebrity. There's a lot of characters in The Royal Tenenbaums and a lot of stories and Wilson doesn't do such a hot job developing any of it--the first two-thirds of the film feels like one gorgeous shot, set to a perfect song after another with variations on the same three or four jokes, until the last third when things really kick into high gear. But for me, despite the various mannered gags and the gorgeous shots and the great, great music, a sense of dissatisfaction crept in before the midway point of the end credits.
Although things with the father, Royal Tenenbaum, are handled well and developed throughout, I think it's because the character is a continuation of Anderson and Wilson's previous thematic concerns--the selfish asshole as creative catalyst, and comically unexpected giver and redeemer. For everyone else, though, Anderson gives the audience not just the cross of a ten minute narrated prologue showing the child geniuses from a distance, but also the grown ex-geniuses secret lives that require they show nothing, give away little, and/or are trapped in narrow patterns of circumscribed behavior--for example, for much of the movie, Luke Wilson with long hair, beard, sunglasses and tennis headband looks like one of those professional circuit poker players doing everything possible not to reveal their tells. That he actually gets to be the most expressive of the three points to the major obstacle of the movie. By the time you get a chance to care for the characters, it feels like way too little too late. I really disliked everything about Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson in this movie (which was a surprise to me--I mean, I liked Zoolander, for Christ's sake) except for the last fifteen seconds in which they share the screen--that was precisely the point where I felt The Royal Tenenbaums got close enough to what it wanted to be that I realized how far from that goal it actually was.
Not that the movie is horrible (unless you're allergic to the precious and twee, in which case this movie might cause your death)--as I said, I laughed, I cried. There are lots of great little moments, Gene Hackman's performance is letter-perfect, and there's a genuine air of pleasure (even if it feels a lot like self-congratulatory pleasure) in the ideas of intelligence and culture and genius. And I was glad to see the music from A Charlie Brown Christmas pop up again, this time even more aggressively than in Rushmore. The Royal Tenenbaums is far and away much, much better than most crap out there--but it's also dissatisfying and frustrating, almost troublingly so. It's not that I'm recommending that you skip this movie, but I do recommend you set your sights much lower than you might otherwise.