The seductive, glamorous, and exquisitely fragile Glass family of J.D. Salinger’s invention might well live down the street from the fairy-tale clan that represents the soul of a fragile but bountiful New York City in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. Reminiscent of Salinger’s Manhattanites, the Tenenbaums are privileged natives in a landscape that doesn’t exist, and perhaps never existed, but seduces with the possibility of having existed once in a cozier, more Christmas-y past.
We all have our personal quirks and family issues that sometimes make us say, “How can anyone else’s family be as goofy as mine?” But then along come movies bringing us dysfunctional families like Moonstruck, Ordinary People and The Royal Tenenbaums that make our personal lives seem like an episode right out of The Waltons. And make no mistake about it-the Tenenbaum family definitely has issues.
Alec Baldwin narrates us through the story of the Tenenbaum family, starting with the overachieving young genius children: Margot the scholarship-winning playwright who grows to be a messed-up, psychological heap of a chain smoker who locks herself in the bathroom; Chas the kid-genius who grows up to be a financial whiz then loses his wife in a plane crash, overprotects his children and has now moved back into the home with his mother; and Ritchie, the former tennis champion who choked away the tournament of his life and now sails around the world on a cruise ship avoiding his family duties. We also meet Royal Tenenbaum, the patriarch of the family who now lives in a local hotel after divorcing his wife, Dr. Etheline Tenenbuam, and getting himself disbarred. We don’t know much about why they divorced, but in a scene inspired by The Magnificent Ambersons, when the children ask the question “is it our fault?” Royal quips “well, we had to make some sacrifices in order to have children, but no”.
Throughout the childrens’ formative years, Royal tended to belittle their talents with thoughtless remarks until he finally abandoned the family, writing them off as more trouble than they were worth. The kids grew up into miserable, burned-out, has-beens who mourn the loss of their brilliant past and can’t stand to look at the hopes of their future. We now join them as Royal concocts a scheme to move back home and rejoin their lives.
The picture’s creative pulse, though, is clearly, brightly, powerfully that of Anderson, a filmmaker whose storytelling style is so fresh, so happily idiosyncratic, and so all-encompassing that it stirs up strong response from people who either love or don’t love his stuff. But Anderson never demands love or attention, never demeans, never makes fun of his dollhouse family even when being funny about their extremis. Here’s a movie guy (the Texas-bred Anderson is too homegrown, I think, to be encumbered with a barfight-starting French designation like auteur) whose cinematic vision gives off a personal, identifiable glow.
Anderson’s admiration for Preston Sturges and Jean Renoir is evident in his ambitious orchestration of the Tenenbaum ensemble. But the movie also has the homey, familiar quality of the Sunday funnies. Richie is always in sweatband and shades, just as Margot rarely appears without her fur coat and Henry is never without his bow tie—all the Tenenbaums, as well as their wannabe Eli, have comic-strip trademarks and are usually operating under the spell of an idée fixe. Etheline, who keeps a pencil handy in her hair, is clearly the adult because she is the lone character who ever seems focused on more than one emotion.
The Royal Tenenbaums aspires toward an elusive moodiness. As in his previous films, Anderson makes extremely precise use of pop music. His main period is the late ’60s—although the Ramones are drafted to score the comic montage of Margot’s outré love life. The entire movie might have been conceived to provide a frame for Nico’s behind-the-beat rendition of These Days. The most romantic scene is set to, and bolstered by, consecutive selections from the Rolling Stones’ Between the Buttons—fetishistically, the LP is even shown playing on a kid’s plastic turntable in the bright yellow pup tent, decorated with decals and filled with toys, that Richie has pitched in the attic.
The Royal Tenenbaums is intricate, fine-stitched, embroidered with sumptuous details from the texture-obsessed production design of David Wasco to the garment-for-garment perfect costumes of Karen Patch. Few ensembles express sadder sad sack defiance than the matching ”shlub and sons” firetruck red track suits worn by Chas and his two boys, Ari and Uzi. Few musical choices, meanwhile, are as inspired a way to circulate air under the movie’s glass-domed biosphere as the snippets taken from Ravel’s ravishing F Major String Quartet and Vince Guaraldi’s glistening Peanuts hymn, Christmas Time Is Here.
The filmmaker who knows how to speak Ravel as well as Gwyneth is indeed a royal gift to American movies.