[Edit done 2/20/13, between brackets. Edit 10/23/13.]
This almost might be a “Quick Vu” review, because I don’t intend to say too much, too deeply, about this film, but I have seen it numerous times, so you would think I would be able to say something incisive and wide-ranging about it.
This almost might be a “Quick Vu” review, because I don’t intend to say too much, too deeply, about this film, but I have seen it numerous times, so you would think I would be able to say something incisive and wide-ranging about it.
The numerous times I’ve seen this peculiar film have mostly been widely spaced apart. I haven’t tried to focus hard on it to write a review as I have with numerous others films that I’ve been (relatively) new to. The Royal Tenenbaums (RT) has always seemed like a set of exotic candies to savor piecemeal, and think about afterward. It is one of director Wes Anderson’s films, and is the only such I’ve seen, and I’m interested in seeing some of his others. There is something at once precious (and fussily crafted) and incisive (and on the grand side) about RT, so it will be tricky to talk about this in any sort of generalizing terms and as if “it resonates with our concerns and lives in this easily defined way.” It’s not a film where you swing through an odyssey of “willy-nilly experience” and then can talk about it, wowed, at length over dinner.
Moreover, in terms of its mood, while this film is, as some today may say (in our weirdly shallow-emotions-featuring time), depressive, I don’t think it is nihilistic, reckless in what it delivers, stupid, tendentious…. It just offers a take on a certain kind of family history and family life, and it includes an often gentle handling of despair, though for those who crave fun and who are in not in the mood for any “dish” of despair, they might find it a little strong.
Details in shots help a very “literary” film
The film, with voiceover narration (by Alec Baldwin) adding to its fairly literary (wit-rich) style, includes a lot of shots of “illustrations” of aspects of the characters and things in their lives, almost like still photos. Especially noticeable in the “still photos,” “deep focus” is used, a technique going back to the 1950s by which all elements in a shot appear at the same level of focus, usually employed with black-and-white films. [Update: It would take a historical "review" more than I can give here, but "deep focus" was first (?) used notably artistically by Orson Welles in such films as Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). It became more common by the 1950s.] In this film, there is also a fussed-over color scheme, with color purity embraced while not-primary colors are often used, which makes the film sometimes seem like precious old paintings.
In these shots, details are highly important. Rather like the old-time details-rich shots in Orson Welles’ best films, or in the folded-in wit of shots in Coen brothers films, RT has a lot of shots where multiple viewings of the film allow you to appreciate what has been densely packaged, in order to convey the many little facets of this unusual family’s statuses and lives. Sometimes, this detail orientation facilitates the story itself.
For instance, where Royal Tenenbaum (played by an earthy/elegant Gene Hackman), the paterfamilias who has recently rejoined the household of the family from which he’s been estranged, wants to take his son’s (Chas’s) young boys Yuri and Uzi out for some fun, Royal sees the two boys close to the door (right in the front of the shot) working like diligent clerks—Chas is generally self-serious and manic about running a real estate/finance office in the house (he is played by Ben Stiller, whose real-life wife Christine Taylor also appears in one or two shots as a secretary in the background)—one of the boys gestures back toward Chas with a pencil, furtive and sympathetic to Royal, as if to say, “Don’t let the boss hear you!” This kind of funny detail can elude you on first viewing, but becomes a fun bonus when you view the film again.
The characters are so numerous and detail-rich, you seemingly need to set up a spreadsheet to sort them out, if you were really to come to grips with this film. (The screenplay is by both Anderson and Owen Wilson, who also features in the film.)
Hackman won a Golden Globe for his performance, and the film was nominated for an Academy Award for its screenplay (but did not win), according to the film’s Wikipedia article. The film seems to have made back more than three times its cost.
A lot of the jokes are drily funny, and music is used in relation to certain situations wittily—including a lot of sampled pop songs from several decades (e.g., The Ramones, The Clash, The Rolling Stones, Van Morrison), with the musical component apparently directed by Mark Mothersbaugh, one of the founders of the New Wave group Devo, and who has scored other films for director Anderson.
Scenes that seem more like a typical film’s
When we really want to see a more normal film in RT, we are rewarded by the scenes in which some significant drama between two people plays out at some length, and it seems as if the story’s got a lot of good tragicomic stuff to say, as articulated by actors allowed to unfurl their stuff:
* Etheline (Angelica Huston) receives a marriage proposal from Henry Sherman (Danny Glover), Etheline’s fastidious (if sometimes clumsy) accountant. Sherman sets this off by advising, in dry accountant terms, that she can change her designation to “single” for tax purposes. But, as the story will soon cement, he has also thereby unexpectedly entreated to become her suitor (while Royal and Etheline are still technically married). Amusingly, house butler Pagoda (played by Kumar Pallana, who is the Asian Indian janitor in Spielberg’s The Terminal [2004]; Pallana died in October 2013 at age 94), can be seen (in deep-focus style outside the window, apparently listening in). Etheline rounds out the comic moment with, “This isn’t really a tax issue, is it.”
* Royal encounters estranged wife Etheline on the street, and works to rejoin their household, claiming he’s dying (of cancer). There is some back-and-forth semi-accidents of understanding and tactical claims, making the scene almost slapstick, but the veteran actors make it work within the taste bounds of the film.
* Etheline and Henry walk and chat in an archeological site (archeology is her field). Henry accidentally falls into a trench, and Etheline realizes this belatedly, goes back to get him—another scene where almost-too-broad comedy is made to work.
* Royal strolls in a park with same estranged wife when he thanks her for how she’s raised the kids (one of the few scenes in the film that isn’t played for quirky or absurd or easy-laugh humor—a modest and adult scene, intimating Royal’s better side, which doesn’t always show in the story).
* Royal provokes a verbal fight (in a kitchen) between himself and Henry. Here, Royal shows a race-baiting side with Henry, but I think it’s acceptable in the film because he isn’t showing racism so much as jealousy and a sense of helplessness with regard to his wife being finally and decisively removed (partly by Henry) from his life (later Royal will grant the divorce between himself and Etheline and give her and Henry his blessing).
* Most touchingly, there is a pretty gentle and tasteful handling of things when Richie Tenenbaum (Luke Wilson), a failed tennis pro, and his adopted, mournful-faced sister Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), confide in his colorful within-the-house tent in the wake of his having attempted suicide. She asks to know if his attempt was tied to his love for her (it is). (As the film works to make acceptable, it’s not horrible that Richie is in love with Margot, as “siblings,” because Margot is adopted.)
Such scenes as these show the heart of a story about an elaborate family and its various associates who have love come and go, and who suffer tragedy and the likes of estrangement, failure, and breakdowns of various sorts (the voiceover refers early on to “two decades of failure, betrayal, and disaster”), and generally negotiate with each other as the children return to the nest.
Royal, too, “returns to the nest,” after he has been living in a hotel for years (and has run out of money to pay his bill there). He is the one true cad of the film, who has been an absentee father for about 17 years; but he also turns out to be the story’s most well-rounded character, including in showing a generous side when he tries to teach Chas’s young boys how to have a little mischievous fun. (Typical of the film and its quirky ways of “coloring” characters—both superficially and sometimes as ways to indicate their inner characters—Chas and both his boys usually wear identical red sweatsuits, as if in their busy lives they sometimes make time for exercise, but that means keeping on their sweatsuits all the time for whenever they can squeeze exercise time in.)
Droll details are plentiful
Many little details abound that rival the detail-consciousness of the likes of Stanley Kubrick. For instance,
* It is probably not coincidental that Royal’s initials (he is mixed Jewish and Irish, with an O’Reilly surname in his background and in his full name) are R.O.T.
* In Chas’s room is a mechanized revolving tie rack, but all the ties are the same.
* Even such a brief, fleeting scene where how Margot lost a finger is recounted includes funny little touches: the Indiana relative who was showing her how to split a log, he looking hick-ish with his Cat Diesel Power billed cap, suddenly lets his corncob pipe drop from his mouth as he finds in shock he has accidentally chopped Margot’s finger off (i.e., both finger and pipe drop, but the finger is unseen).
* In a scene from a later time, Margot is rather lethargic in a bathroom where, in her and her husband’s house, she holes up most of the day in the bathtub, watching TV and indulging in her secret habit of smoking cigarettes. She is drumming her fingers on a porcelain surface, and you can hear the “indecent” hard tap of her wooden artificial finger hitting the porcelain. It’s these sorts of things that give the movie a Mad magazine air.
* Last but not least, Bill Murray plays Raleigh Sinclair, who with his rather outlandishly bushy beard is on obvious parody of neurologist/writer Oliver Sacks. Sinclair keeps studying a disorder in the same boy through many of the glimpses of his ongoing career we see; the boy almost seems part of the extended family, including with ironic, eye-rolling reaction to some of the family stuff he happens to witness.
Musical touches add to the exoticism
Some choices of music are so weird and yet complement the scenes in a rather exquisite way. When Margot goes by a “Green Line bus” (another regularly used quirky detail, along with the crappy-looking “gypsy cabs” that feature in so many scenes) to meet Richie at a shipping port, where he is returning from his long overseas cruise, they meet like lovebirds coming thro’ the rye. The background music is something unusual—with folkish fingerpicking on a guitar and a European (German?) voice singing the likes of “I don’t do much talking…”—what song is that? So odd, and yet it fits the scene in the quirky way the film revels in.
Some offbeat musical choices bleed from one scene into another. Starting when Etheline and Henry are at the archeological site (after Henry has emerged from the hole he’s fallen into), and some aspect of their being in a loving relationship manifests, this seems underlined with music starting that sounds like some slouchy background accent of horns off one track of a multi-track jazzy recording done late-night in a nightclub, with a human voice echoing the melody of the trumpet amid the horns, scat-singing, with a sort of “shower-stall Sinatra” banality. This same somehow atmospheric (yet seemingly facetious) music carries over into the scene where Royal meets up with Chas’s boys (at an athletic field/tennis court/such) and starts to arrange with them to appeal to Chas to let him meet them.
