The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

I make no secret that Bottle Rocket, Wes Anderson’s first feature film which was released in 1996, is my favorite movie of all time. I watch it every year, but I could watch it every week, probably. I just love it, and I always have. I’m not sure why it speaks to me so profoundly, either. I can say that the entire love story between Inez and Anthony is a kind of romantic dream. This girl you found, she is everything, the prettiest thing you ever saw, and you have to have her. You’d do anything to have her, and you can’t think about anything other than her. When she’s gone, you count the minutes until you will see her again.

Speaking for myself, I only ever felt that way about two or three girls in my entire life, and I don’t think I can feel that way anymore. I think it’s a component of being young. Bottle Rocket gets to the heart of that, I think.

It also has some excellent comedy, such as the scene with James Caan doing some weird martial arts with a Asian dude in his tighty whiteys, or again with James Caan around the table at the country club. Bob is once again subject to the bullying of his little brother, and Caan’s Mr. Henry sticks up for him:

I hope this doesn’t offend you Bob, but your brother’s a cocksucker.

It isn’t funny until the entire table erupts in laughter and I start laughing with them. It’s one of my favorite scenes in any movie. There’s others, but here I am going on about Bottle Rocket when in fact this post is supposed to be about The Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson’s third feature which was released in 2001. A movie that I distinctly do not like, but I want to like it. I just don’t, and the only way I can make sense of that is to look at it in the context of what Anderson started out doing with Bottle Rocket (and somewhat with his second film Rushmore) and how he quite quickly started doing these hyper-stylized pieces about rich people with characters that are more cartoons than people.

All these rich people are dealing with problems of their own creation, which is of course something people do, and I understand that, so I’m not sure what I trying to say here. Let me slow down.

Take the character Richie Tenenbaum, the tennis player who has a meltdown on the court on live television when his sister, his adopted sister Margot, played by Gwenyth Paltrow, marries Bill Murray’s Raleigh St. Clair, and this knowledge devastates Richie to the point that he throws a prolonged tantrum on the tennis court, quits tennis all together, leaves everything behind and lives for a year on a ship sailing around the world, just because he wants to commit incest with his little (adopted, so it’s okay) sister, and he eventually makes a feeble attempt at suicide over her. It sounds complex, but I’m trying to say that I never buy any of it, not even for a minute. There’s no soul in it. I think the audience is supposed to be moved by this tortured love idea, but for me it is DOA. Then, I start thinking about it, and this narrative takes up a lot of space in this film and I think the film would be better if it was cut out entirely. I just want to know more about Royal.

Gene Hackman, who plays Royal Tenenbaum, is awesome, of course. So is Angelica Huston. So is, believe it or not, Ben Stiller, who gives a muted and serious performance in this film. I somewhat pull for Royal to get his shit together, and I like the character in theory getting busted down to being a hotel elevator operator and finding his redemption. Moreover, I like the idea of these worlds connecting, the world of the working people and the world of these rich academic narcissists. I’m just saying, I think, that those don’t connect enough, that these characters are too cartoonish to make it all fit together. I’m trying to say something like that. Paltrow’s Margot is a cold and heartless bitch, which I would be stunned if Gwyneth Paltrow herself wasn’t a cold and heartless bitch in real life, and that’s fine, but this character doesn’t work because I have no idea why Wilson’s Richie, the sweeheart, would be so hung up on this bitch. He just is. So, we end up with two actors who are connected to their roles quite profoundly, but they don’t pair. Maybe that was the point in pairing them. Doesn’t change the fact that I think it’s a better movie without them in it.

Here’s the thing, and I’m going to contradict myself: Anderson’s most obvious talent is in what he sees and is able to tease out of his actors. He connects the actor with the role in a way that brings out and marries their intangible qualities as actors to their characters. If you watch the Bottle Rocket short, the black and white student film that became the feature version, you will see that between that film and the feature film Anthony, played by Luke Wilson, becomes the sweet and innocent good guy that Luke Wilson is made to play. In the short, both Dignan and Anthony curse a lot, but in the feature that’s all gone, because it didn’t fit. (I’ve wondered how that happened, who gave Anderson those notes to clean up that dialogue.) What we get in the feature is so wonderful: These guys are grown up toddlers who experience the world as new, and they are just acting out cowboys and Indians, something they saw on television. The entire movie works on that level, as some kind of childlike fantasy, but without all the heavy-handed and overly stylized fluff that calls attention to itself and to me becomes a distraction from the story. Bottle Rocket, and Rushmore are not “hyper-real” at all, and they aren’t hyper-fake cartoons, either.

The cartoon aesthetic emerges fully formed, almost out of nowhere, in The Royal Tenenbaums. I like Anderson’s cartoonish aesthetic, but I don’t love it. At this point, he’s kind of in a bind, isn’t he? His abilities with actors and his eye for the language of cinema would yield probably some excellent films in different modes, but if he did something different people would look askance at the attempt, I think. They might say he’s admitting that the cartoon aethetic is worn out. Others might refuse to accept anything else. Where’s the sweet whimsy, Wes? (If you write about Wes Anderson it is required you use the term whimsy at least once, fyi.)

All of that was just to make the point that I want to like The Royal Tenenbaums, but I just can’t find a way to get there, and I think it is because this film is where Anderson broke off from the spirit of his first two films and started this entire project of live-action cartoons. Can we have two timelines, then? One timeline in which Anderson continued to mine the vein of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore and we get seven or eight more films out of that, and another in which the trajectory started by The Royal Tenenbaums also gets to exist, because I want those films in the world as is, too.

I think, at some point, these movies will end and he probably will do something else, if for no other reason than boredom. I don’t know, though. People get up every day and do the same thing and it always mystifies me because I am not wired that way, and Anderson may just be the type to go punch the clock again and again. I can say, though, that I will be watching no matter what he does.