The Royal Tenenbaums has been something of a hit in the United States, and perhaps it’s not too hard to see why. There seems to be an ongoing fascination with the dysfunctional family and a deep-seated need for some kind of resolution to its conflicts. So far so usual; this is not the first American movie to deal with such themes. But there is also, perhaps, a taste for a quirky kind of surface, an appetite that might have been stimulated by the surge in independent filmmaking and its capacity for putting a fresh spin on at least the look of American life.
The Tenenbaums are a royally dysfunctional family. The ”Royal” part has nothing to do with descent from aristocracy or the like; that’s just Dad’s Christian name. He has put his stamp on them, giving them his first name as well as his last. In fact, their lives are all structured by his misdeeds. We start out with an amusing summary of their childhoods — the overachieving Chas, the arty Margot, and the sporty Richie. Chas will grow up to be played by Ben Stiller, Margot by Gwyneth Paltrow and Richie by Luke Wilson. They are all pretty neurotic. Also figured into the mix are mom Etheline (Anjelica Huston), her black beau Henry Sherman (Danny Glover), the family friend Eli Cash (Owen Wilson, also co-scriptwriter) and Margot’s husband, Raleigh (Bill Murray).
Here we have a rich cast of eccentric characters, and after the prologue we meet them 20 years later, ”two decades of betrayal, disaster and failure” having gone by. Royal had pretty much abandoned them for those two decades, but he is now ready to make a comeback into their lives. Gene Hackman plays Royal Tenenbaum, and he certainly makes a meal of it. It is a detailed comic performance, one he is clearly enjoying.
That, however, should in itself give us a clue to what’s really going on here. Royal is meant to be loathsome yet lovable. He’s a bastard, but he’s going to redeem himself. Appropriately, given his name, Hackman smokes almost as much in The Royal Tenenbaums as he did in Heartbreakers, playing a tobacco baron being conned by Sigourney Weaver. And yet, as Royal’s redemption looms, suddenly the cigarettes disappear. If smoking has become an activity nowadays permitted only to villains in Hollywood movies, this little transformation is a dead giveaway.
The movie is wonderfully styled, with the different characters given specific looks that work to characterise them in a cartoony way —Stiller’s red tracksuit, echoed by those of his sons; Paltrow’s Gothic eyeshadow. The Tenenbaum house is a marvel, too, with its ramshackle architecture and multitude of storeys. And yet, in another, subconscious giveaway, when Royal returns and takes up residence, it’s in the attic, the place of dreams and fantasy, rather than in the cellar where he belongs.
For, in the end (and I apologise for these ”spoilers”), this isn’t the dark, sparky comedy of family life that it pretends to be. The quirky styling is just a veneer over a rather ordinary, and extremely shallow, movie. There aren’t many real quirks here at all, and Royal’s decades of abandonment, plus the seedy manipulation to which he stoops in the movie’s first three-quarters, are changed into sweetness and light within minutes. Perhaps we shouldn’t have believed in his nastiness in the first place; perhaps we were excessively convinced by Hackman’s superb performance. All the bad Royal has done is washed away with a paltry gesture or two, and any real emotion is sacrificed for sentimental wish-fulfilment.
I have a theory about film narrative and its necessities: for a movie to be satisfying in terms of the story it tells, a sad ending has to be inevitable, and a happy ending has to be earned. In the world of The Royal Tenenbaums, redemption comes very cheap.