Wes Anderson's Tenenbaums: Oh, for quirk's sake!

Divorce. Suicide. Incest. Failure and disappointment.

Welcome to the funny world of Wes Anderson. The writer-director delivers a fractured family fairy tale which is either the funniest sad movie of the year or the saddest funny one—I haven’t yet decided. One thing I know for sure: The Royal Tenenbaums creates a universe all its own, a place that exists somewhere between the writings of John Updike and Dave Eggers, with a music score provided by the likes of John Prine.

The Royal Tenenbaums is wistful, sardonic and bittersweet. It’s a refreshingly-literate movie that dares to structure its parts into chapters (it’s also narrated in “once upon a time” fashion by Alec Baldwin).

It’s also the kind of movie that cleaves its audiences neatly in half: the Loveits and the Hateits. You’re in one camp or the other. There is no in-between, no flapping your hand in “so-so” fashion, no forgetting the two hours in the dark you spent with the Tenenbaums.

Beginning with the first line, “Royal Tenenbaum bought the house on Archer Avenue in his thirty-fifth year,” and continuing all the way to the final image of a cemetery gate closing, Anderson and co-writer Owen Wilson thrust us into the cluttered world of a broken family trying, in fits and starts, to glue itself back together again. Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) is a Cold War era patriarch who, through his hubris and philanderings, has managed to nuke his nuclear family into dysfunction. He has sired two geniuses—Chas (Ben Stiller) and Richie (Luke Wilson)—who found success before they hit puberty: Chas breeding Dalmatian mice (you know, little white rodents with black spots), and Richie as a tennis pro. Royal’s other child, Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), is adopted but that doesn’t stop her from writing an award-winning play by the time she was 9. Their mother, Etheline (Angelica Huston), is an anthropologist who has plenty of material under her own roof (she writes a case study of her brood called Family of Geniuses). With her Mona Lisa smile, Etheline is the calm at the center of the Tenenbaums, even as everything is falling apart.

But fall apart it does as Royal decides he and Etheline can no longer live together. They break up, but don’t divorce—Etheline staying in the Archer Avenue house as Royal goes to live in the Lindberg Palace Hotel, setting up a law practice from his suite there. The children, for their part, continue to trade stocks on Wall Street, win literature awards and play at the U.S. Tennis Open. Without parental harmony, however, it’s an emotionally-vacant life: “After two decades of failure, betrayal and disaster, virtually all memory of the Tenenbaum brilliance had been subsequently erased.”

In the whip-smart (and whip-fast) prologue, we’re bombarded with these and hundreds of other details about the family—this movie packs more details about its characters into the first ten minutes than majority of other releases in 2001 could only strive for in two hours. Every second is bursting with something interesting going on, either in its dialogue or the overstuffed visual style (The Royal Tenenbaums is worth seeing twice for its art direction alone).

And so we slide into the lives of the Tenenbaums: Chas, whose wife was recently killed in a plane crash, is trying to bring up his sons, Uzi and Ari, in an ultra-safe world; Richie, pining with unrequited love for his stepsister, is sailing all the oceans of the world; and Margot, trapped in a loveless marriage to psychologist Raleigh St. Clair (Bill Murray), smothers her emotions and spends six hours a day in the bathtub, secretly smoking imported cigarettes. There’s one other Tenenbaum-by-proxy, next-door-neighbor Eli Cash (Owen Wilson), a kid who always wanted to be a Tenenbaum (he’s tried so hard to fit in, he wears cowboy outfits and writes novels like Killing Custer, “a book that presupposes Custer didn’t die at the Little Big Horn.”

Events are set in motion when Etheline has a marriage proposal from the family accountant (Danny Glover). Royal, pricked by jealousy and facing eviction from the Lindbergh, moves back to Archer Avenue. “I want my family back,” he announces with hearty good cheer. He’s greeted by disbelief and anger by everyone seated around the dinner table.

Chas, for instance, is still bitter over the fact that there’s still a BB lodged underneath the skin on his knuckle from the time when his father shot him during a childhood game. “Why’d you shoot me?” he whines. “I thought we were on the same team.”

It’s moments like this when The Royal Tenenbaums leaps to life in the imagination. There is so much simmering under the surface of this family that there’s really no way any review could do it justice. Reading this, you cannot even imagine the sadness, the joy, the longing, the bitterness and, ultimately, the redemption the family goes through during the course of the film.

Anderson has established a track record as a chronicler of quirk with his previous films Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1998), but while those movies were smart and funny, Anderson seems to have written The Royal Tenenbaums from the heart and head, rather than just from the head. Sure, those guys in Bottle Rocket (Dignon, Anthony, and Bob) were funny bumbling crooks, and Rushmore’s Max was a Benjamin Braddock for our generation, but the Tenenbaums are richer, more fully-developed characters. I, for one, was sad to leave their lives when the credits rolled and the lights came up.