Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Last week, I was taunting Mr. Beaks with some of the coolness I get to enjoy in the weeks ahead, and then he reminded me that he was going to see Wes Anderson’s new film this week. That shut me up. Right now, this is one of the most eagerly awaited film for the months ahead, and this screening was incredibly hard to get into. Let’s see what Beaks thinks after all the anticipation...
THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (d. Wes Anderson, w. Owen Wilson and Anderson)
It’s probably safe to say there wasn’t a soul expecting then-tyro director Wes Anderson to follow up his modest indie smash BOTTLE ROCKET with RUSHMORE, a film so startlingly inventive, technically assured, and tonally pitch-perfect in its depiction of a brash young man’s rough passage through the minefield of adolescence that it drew instant, and justified, comparisons to THE GRADUATE. It was a triumph of boundless imagination from a filmmaker who had suddenly discovered, and irrevocably fallen in love with, the seemingly endless possibilities of the medium; however, in shattering the notion of a sophomore slump, Anderson also set the expectations for his third feature to seemingly insurmountable heights. With the element of surprise no longer in his favor, could Anderson simply meet, if not surpass, his prior triumph?
Stylistically, THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS, arguably the most buzzed about film at this year’s New York Film Festival, picks up where RUSHMORE left off, unfolding this time as a piece of literature checked out of a library, rather than a stage play. Immediately, Anderson makes a rather overt reference to a famously “Magnificent” clan, as we’re given a brief overview of the family history by a third-person narrator (Alec Baldwin). As “Hey Jude” rings out on the soundtrack, we’re introduced to the Tenenbaums in a time of crisis: Royal, the brood’s puckish patriarch, is separating from his urban archaeologist wife, Etheline (Anjelica Huston), who has grown tired of her husband’s selfish behavior, and simply wants him out of her life. Caught amid this familial tumult are their three children: Chas (Ben Stiller), Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Richie (Luke Wilson), all three of whom are thrust into minor celebrity when it’s discovered that they’re bona fide geniuses; Chas being the financial wiz, Margot an award-winning playwright and Richie….. well, Richie’s only a mediocre artist, but he does develop into a professional tennis phenom, trumpeted by sports magazines nationwide as “The Baumer.” While the children are developing at an alarming rate, Royal drifts in and out of their lives, offering little in the way of responsible parenting. If he isn’t shooting Chas in the knuckle with a BB gun, he’s deriding Margot’s plays while continually reminding her that she was adopted.
It’s no wonder, then, that the children plateau upon reaching adulthood and eventually collapse in often spectacular fashion (one of the film’s funniest bits depicts Richie’s humiliating meltdown in the finals of a major tennis tournament, where he’s routed in straight sets after committing over seventy-two unforced errors). Margot ceases writing and marries a quack-ish child psychiatrist (Bill Murray), Chas’s wife is killed in a plane crash, leaving him to raise their two sons by himself, while Richie is literally and figuratively adrift, floating about the high seas, and pining away for the one great, unrequited love of his life, which happens to be his own adopted sister. Meanwhile, Royal is facing a collapse of his own; having been disbarred and left in financial ruin through Chas’s tireless efforts, he finds himself in dire financial straits, leading to his eviction and subsequent banishment to the 375th Street Y (quite possibly the best New York gag in the entire film). Royal is also felled by jealousy when he discovers Etheline’s plans to marry her longtime financial advisor, Henry Sherman (Danny Glover), which leads him to concoct a scheme that designed to not only reunite him with Etheline, but also bring the entire family back under the same roof.
And this is just in the opening twenty minutes!
Once again, Anderson has deposited us in a richly-imagined universe that, while supposedly rooted in the present, seems to be stuck in other decades; the house’s decor has a pronounced, early-‘70s feel, while certain appliances and gadgets recall the mid-‘80s. Most remarkable, though, is how he has managed to transform New York City into a classic, Anderson-ian universe. His is a fanciful Gotham, populated by beat-up gypsy cabs and bizarre buildings few New Yorkers would recognize (the house, a character in the film itself, really exists at 144th and Convent. I’m sure there are more than a few location scouts headed uptown this very instant to confirm this).
Most importantly, Anderson still has that innate, Scorsese-esque feel for pop music, particularly in an uproarious sequence where Royal seeks to “breed some recklessness” into his grandchildren to the strains of Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard”. This unerring musical sense also helps make the film’s various, and potentially difficult, tonal shifts, including a surprisingly graphic suicide attempt, more palatable than they have any right being.
And therein lies the problem: Anderson so madly skips from one improbable complication to the next that he never manages to fully develop a single character. While Hackman and Huston do their best to suggest a couple that was, and could still be, madly in love with one another, the script strands them with stock moments like a banal conversation over a Central Park stroll. Sadly, Paltrow and Wilson (either of ‘em) don’t fare any better, save for a touching rooftop sequence that comes too late in the film to inject some much needed heart into the proceedings.
Yet for all the film’s shortcomings, there’s no discounting that THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS is easily one of the year’s most entertaining films, and while there isn’t an individual performance worth singling out (save for Anderson regular Kumar Pallana, who steals every scene as Pagoda, Royal’s Sancho Panza), the ensemble work is exemplary.
Anderson might not have cleared the bar this time out, but he comes damn close. This is the less a misstep than a minor, yet interesting work. If RUSHMORE is Anderson’s SOME LIKE IT HOT, consider this THE FORTUE COOKIE (which had a similar chapter structure itself). Everyone should be lucky enough to fail like this.
Faithfully submitted,
