the rhapsodic cineaste

“Can’t somebody be a shit their whole life and try to repair the damage? I mean, I think people want to hear that.” – Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman)

I unabashedly adore The Royal Tenenbaums, and have ever since I first saw it in the theater. If Rushmore is, as I described yesterday, a smaller film, focused on the eccentric Max Fischer, The Royal Tenenbaums is a film so large and overstuffed, that it’s presented as a novel, with characters and situations so complicated, that perhaps we don’t even see all of them on the screen. It feels that we’ve come in on the middle of something, and that with more than its one-hour and forty minute runtime, we’d likely discover all sorts of untold stories about the Tenenbaum family.

In Anderson’s previous films there were whimsical characters, like Bottle Rocket’s Dignan, or Rushmore’s Max Fischer and Herman Blume, but then Bottle Rocket also had Inez, the housekeeper, and Rushmore had Miss Cross—I hesitate to call them ordinary, but at the least they were more conventional.

There is nothing conventional in this film. Anderson’s characterizations exist entirely in their own world here. The Tenenbaums, their friends, lovers and employees all feel fully realized, each more idiosyncratic than the last. And whereas his previous films were more intimate, the themes here are both big & universal.

Being a new parent, it occurs to me that the Tenenbaum children begin life as you hope your own kids will, they’re precocious, talented and ambitious. Unfortunately, Royal Tenenbaum is both the parent you don’t want and the one you never want to be. Simultaneously abusive and detached, Royal is responsible for the depression, fear and self-doubt that plagues his children as adults. He realizes this, but quickly denies it saying, “I’m the one that failed them, or anyway it’s nobody’s fault.”

Now in the twilight of his life, Royal is trying to make amends. When confronted by his estranged wife Etheline, he explains, “I thought I could win you back…plus I was broke. And I got kicked out of my hotel.” We’re never really sure of Royal’s true motivations, but that can be said of the people we know in real life as well.

And as fantastical as The Royal Tenenbaums is, it also speaks movingly about real life; of being a parent, or being a child, of love and loss, of finding one’s true self, and in making peace with those who we love.

They say that being a grandparent is a wholly different experience than being a parent. While all of Royal’s faults—his anathema to responsibility—make him a shitty father, he turns out to be something of a perfect grandfather. As he explains to Etheline, “…you can’t raise boys to be scared of life, you gotta brew some recklessness into them.”

The montage that follows is my favorite sequence in the film: Royal and his grandsons playing in traffic, shoplifting and gambling. And he’s the perfect antidote to their father’s life of fear and grief.

There is so much I haven’t talked about, but that would deprive you of experiencing this film for yourselves. This is one of the greats, and should not be missed.

Each of my commentaries on Wes Anderson’s films have contained a few random observations and I’ll continue this trend here.

Looking at the theatrical posters for each of the first three Anderson films, you can see that by this film’s release Anderson is in control of every aspect of his films, including the marketing. The posters for his first two films were clearly designed by the studios’ art departments. Here even the advertising tells us we’re getting a “Wes Anderson film.”

Anderson wanted to begin The Royal Tenenbaums with the Beatles song Hey Jude but could not secure the rights to the original track. Similarly, Paul Thomas Anderson wanted to begin his third film, Magnolia (1999) with the Beatles song Revolution 9, but also failed to secure the required permission.

A final observation about music. In each of his first three films Anderson has used Christmas carols on the soundtrack, in sequences having nothing to do with Christmas. Good King Wenceslas can be heard in Bottle Rocket, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing is played in Rushmore, and both the instrumental and vocal versions of Christmas Time is Here, from A Charlie Brown Christmas, are present in The Royal Tenenbaums.

Interestingly, or not, the television show Arrested Development also occasionally used the instrumental version Christmas Time is Here in sequences that had nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas.