Wes Anderson (2001)

Either Wes Anderson or Owen Wilson or Noah Baumbach – or more than one of them – must have a strong and painful memory of losing a much loved pet.   The disappearance of the family cat in The Squid and the Whale (written by Baumbach) followed on from a dog being left behind on an island in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (written by Anderson and Baumbach) and Buckley the beagle getting run over in The Royal Tenenbaums (by Anderson and Wilson).  Or maybe it’s only because I have memories of this kind that I see a pattern.

The Royal Tenenbaums was nothing like as funny as I remembered (from having seen it on its original release) – maybe because I’ve seen Rushmore, as well as The Life Aquatic, in the meantime and Wes Anderson’s deadpan absurdism has become too familiar.   What seems most distinctive now is the look of the film.   It’s an original screenplay but Anderson presents it as the adaptation of a book (according to Wikipedia, the Tenenbaums are loosely based on J D Salinger’s Glass family).  There’s a voiceover narration throughout (by Alec Baldwin); in the protracted set-up of the main story, the narration is so dominant that what’s on the screen is no more than illustration of what the voice is saying – and these visual aids do suggest colour plates in a book.  (The film’s palette changes but is consistently deliberate – sometimes bright colours, sometimes fawns and soft pinks.)  The whole picture is divided into ‘chapters’:   the first page of each book chapter appears on the screen, we can read the first sentence, and the scene described in that sentence then provides the next shot as the moving pictures resume.     Anderson enjoys putting text on the screen (in a variety of fonts) and the words often describe what we can already see.  His use of this device, in combination with the visualisation of the sentences in the book, creates a kind of symmetrical tautology.

The Royal Tenenbaums is an ironic conceit, a play on the staple ingredients of dysfunctional family dramas:  precociously successful kids who then go into reverse; childhood traumas that change everything; parents asking themselves where they went wrong etc.  It’s clever but I didn’t like it second time around – I felt Anderson and his cast were having more fun than I was anyway.    The actors are very witty and accomplished but I found myself most of the time recognising rather than enjoying their wit and accomplishment.  Anjelica Huston is enjoyable, though:  as Etheline, the mother, she has a wonderful stately anxiety.   Gene Hackman is Royal, the fathomlessly insensitive father of the family.  The three children are Gwyneth Paltrow (magnetically etiolated as a zonked, sexually unpredictable playwright), Ben Stiller (a traumatically widowed financial whiz) and Luke Wilson (an aborted tennis star, who’s in love with his (adopted) sister).  Owen Wilson is a very singular family friend; Danny Glover is Etheline’s accountant and suitor; Kumar Pallana is Royal’s servant and spy.  Bill Murray is a neurologist called Raleigh St Clair.

11 July 2009