The Royal Tenenbaums

MOVIE #1,300 •🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿• 12.28.23 WES ANDERSON: DIRECTOR FOCUS In many ways, early Wes Anderson feels like the purest Wes Anderson, at least on a character/story level. The artifice, aesthetics and technique that he is most associated with are still here, but they often take a back seat (or simply work to heighten) these peculiar and particular people, their histories and their plight/arc. This is the last of the three Owen Wilson co-authored screenplays and I wonder if something wasn’t lost in that collaboration moving forward. They seem to equal the later pictures in terms of joke/quip volume, but they also have more heart.

I also might be starting to come around on the Pauline Kael idea about only watching a movie once. There's something about knowing all the beats and lines before they come that just doesn't do it for me anymore. (I'm trying not to let this impact my critique here because I see it as a completely separate, broader issue when it comes to reviewing films you’ve seen many times over.)

This one also marks the first real utilization of an ensemble cast. And while Gene Hackman is clearly the anchor/center, I found things a bit muddy in how that’s handled in the first act. But the final third of this is flawless, and perhaps my favorite piece of Anderson filmmaking. On paper, Royal’s redemption might seem cheap but Hackman is so damn good and funny, and every scene and sequence in the leadup to the chaos of the wedding has the perfect mix of absurdism and pathos. It still hits me deeply, every time.

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⫷ MOVIE #1,299 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,301 ⫸

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The Royal Tenenbaums is a 2001 American comedy-drama film directed by Wes Anderson and co-written with Owen Wilson. It stars Danny Glover, Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Bill Murray, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, and Owen Wilson. Ostensibly based on a nonexistent novel, and told with a narrative influenced by the writing of J. D. Salinger, it follows the lives of three gifted siblings who experience great success in youth, and even greater disappointment and failure in adulthood. The children's eccentric father, Royal Tenenbaum (Hackman), leaves them in their adolescent years and returns to them after they have grown, falsely claiming he has a terminal illness. He works on reconciling with his children and ex-wife (Huston). It was released on December 14, 2001.