The Royal Tenenbaums
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).
The Royal Tenenbaums
- Wes Anderson
- Owen Wilson
- Wes Anderson
- Barry Mendel
- Scott Rudin
- October 5, 2001 (New York Film Festival)[2]
- December 14, 2001 (United States)[3]
109 minutes[4]
United States
English
$21 million[5]
$71.4 million[5]
With a variety of influences, including Louis Malle's 1963 film The Fire Within and Orson Welles' 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons, the story involves themes of the dysfunctional family, lost greatness, and redemption. An absurdist and ironic sense of humor pervades the film, which features a soundtrack subsequently released in two albums. The Royal Tenenbaums was shot in and around New York City, including a house in Harlem used for the Tenenbaum residence. The filmmakers went to efforts to distinguish the film's backgrounds from a recognizable New York, with fashions and sets combining the appearances of different time periods.
After debuting at the New York Film Festival, The Royal Tenenbaums received positive reviews from critics and was Anderson's most financially successful film until 2014's The Grand Budapest Hotel. Hackman won a Golden Globe for his performance, and the screenwriters were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. In 2016, it was included in BBC's 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century.
Plot[edit]
Royal Tenenbaum explains to his three adolescent children, Chas, Margot, and Richie, that he and his wife, Etheline, are separating. Each of the children achieved great success at a young age. Chas is a math and business genius, from whom Royal steals money. Margot, who was adopted, was awarded a grant for a play that she wrote in the ninth grade. Richie is a tennis prodigy and artist who expresses his love for Margot through paintings. Royal regularly takes Richie on outings without the other children. Eli Cash is the Tenenbaums' neighbor and Richie's best friend. Also part of the Tenenbaum household is Pagoda, the trusted valet.
Twenty-two years later, Royal is kicked out of the hotel where he has been living. The children are in a post-success slump, with Richie traveling the world on a cruise ship, following a breakdown. He writes to Eli revealing his romantic love for Margot. Chas has become overprotective of his sons, Ari and Uzi, following his wife Rachael's death in a plane crash. Margot is married to neurologist Raleigh St. Clair, from whom she hides her smoking and her checkered past. Raleigh is conducting research on a subject named Dudley Heinsbergen, and diagnoses Dudley with Heinsbergen Syndrome.
Etheline's longtime accountant, Henry Sherman, proposes to her. Learning of Henry's proposal via Pagoda, Royal claims that he has stomach cancer to win back his wife's and children's affections. Etheline calls her children home, and Royal moves back in and sets up medical equipment in Richie's room. Royal learns of Chas' overprotective nature and takes his grandsons on an adventure involving shoplifting and dog fighting. On their return, Chas berates him for endangering his boys while Royal accuses Chas of having a nervous breakdown.
Eli, with whom Margot has been having an affair, tells her that Richie told him he loves her. Royal discovers the affair and objects to Margot's treatment of Raleigh, who confides to Richie his suspicions of Margot having an affair. He and Richie hire a private investigator to surveil her. Meanwhile, Henry investigates Royal's cancer claim and discovers his hospital had closed, his doctor does not exist, and that his cancer medication is only Tic Tacs. He confronts Pagoda, Royal's partner in the scheme, and gathers the family to tell them that Royal has been lying about his illness. Afterwards, Royal and Pagoda are kicked out from the family home and into a gypsy cab.
Richie and Raleigh get the private eye's report on Margot, which reveals her history of smoking and sexual promiscuity, including a previous marriage to a Jamaican recording artist. Both men take the news hard, with Richie going into a bathroom, shaving off his hair and beard, and slashing his wrists in an attempt of suicide. Dudley finds Richie and Raleigh rushes him to hospital. As the Tenenbaums sit in the waiting room, Raleigh confronts Margot of her past, reveals that he knows she smokes, and then leaves. Richie checks himself out of the hospital and meets with Margot in his childhood tent to confess his love. They quietly cherish their mutual, secret love and they kiss.
Royal decides that he wants Etheline to be happy, and finally files for a divorce. Before Henry and Etheline's wedding, Eli, high on mescaline, crashes his car into the side of the house. Royal rescues Ari and Uzi just in time, but the boys' dog, Buckley, is killed in the collision. Enraged, Chas chases Eli through the house and tosses him into the neighbor's yard. Eli and Chas agree that they both need help. Chas thanks Royal for saving his sons and for buying them a Dalmatian named Sparkplug from the responding firemen as a replacement for Buckley. Forty-eight hours later, Etheline and Henry are married in a judge's chambers.
Some time later, Margot releases a new play inspired by her family and past events, Raleigh publishes a book about Dudley's condition, Eli checks himself into a drug rehabilitation facility in North Dakota, and Richie begins teaching a junior tennis program. Chas becomes less overprotective of his sons, and Royal seems to have improved his relationship with all his children, and looks to be on better terms with Etheline. He has a heart attack and dies at the age of 68. Chas accompanies him in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, and is the only witness to his death. The family attends his funeral, where the epitaph (which he wrote beforehand) reads that he "Died tragically rescuing his family from the wreckage of a destroyed sinking battleship."
Production[edit]
Development[edit]
A starting point for the story's concept was the divorce of director Wes Anderson's mother and father, though the evolved story bears little resemblance to it.[10] French director Louis Malle's works, such as his 1971 Murmur of the Heart, were an influence on Anderson, with The Royal Tenenbaums particularly drawing from The Fire Within (1963), where a suicidal man tries to meet his friends.[11] A line from The Fire Within is translated into English and appears as "I'm going to kill myself tomorrow."[12] Orson Welles' 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons was also an influence,[13] with Anderson acknowledging he may have subconsciously selected the main set for its reflection of Welles' production.[14] E. L. Konigsburg's book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, where the characters Claudia and Jamie run away to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, inspired the story of Margot and Richie hiding out in a museum.[15][16] Having read the book, Anderson said it long stuck with him.[16]
J. D. Salinger's characters in the 1961 book Franny and Zooey inspired much of the child prodigy material.[17] The children of the Glass family in Salinger's work are precocious with an abundance of exceptional talents.[18] Franny and Zooey also features characters wearing distinctive fashions and a character with the name Tannenbaum.[19] "Tenenbaum" is the name of a family of Anderson's acquaintance.[20]
The film Les Enfants Terribles (1950) by Jean-Pierre Melville partly inspired Richie and Margot's relationship.[10] Other inspirations were one of Anderson's childhood friends who loved his sister, and Anderson's interest in the incest taboo; he acknowledged the relationship became more believable when the story was revised to make Margot adopted.[21] In inventing the characters, Owen Wilson and Anderson also used neurologist Oliver Sacks as a model for Raleigh,[22] while the notion of Eli writing Old Custer was based on Cormac McCarthy's style of storytelling.[10] Wilson and Anderson completed the screenplay in two years, needing the extended time because of its complexity.[7]
Release[edit]
The film premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 5, 2001, which had previously screened Anderson's Rushmore in 1998.[2] Distributed by Touchstone Pictures,[71] it opened in New York City and Los Angeles in December 2001.[72] In February 2002, it was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival.[73]
To mark a decade since its debut, Anderson and his stars returned to the New York Film Festival for a screening of The Royal Tenenbaums in fall 2011.[74] After previously publishing a DVD edition, The Criterion Collection released a Blu-ray in Region A in 2012.[75]
Reception[edit]
Box office[edit]
On its opening weekend, The Royal Tenenbaums made $276,891 in five theaters, or around $55,396 at each venue.[71] By February 2002, it doubled Rushmore's total gross at the U.S. box office.[76]
The film finished its run on June 20, 2002, with a gross of $52,364,010 in North America. It made $19,077,240 in other territories, for a worldwide total of $71,441,250.[5] With the final $70 million gross, it remained Anderson's most financially successful film when it returned to the New York Film Festival in 2011.[74] The Grand Budapest Hotel surpassed it in 2014.[77]
Critical response[edit]
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 81% based on 210 reviews, and an average rating of 7.50/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "The Royal Tenenbaums is a delightful adult comedy with many quirks and a sense of poignancy. Many critics especially praised Hackman's performance.”[78] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 76 out of 100, based on 34 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[79] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C−" on an A+ to F scale.[80]
At its premiere at the New York Film Festival, A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times that it eventually won him over as charming, and that Hackman brought "quick precision and deep seriousness [that] nearly rescue[d] this movie from its own whimsy".[2] Variety's Todd McCarthy described the film, "As richly conceived as the novel it pretends to be."[81]
Richard Schickel of Time wrote, "As with Anderson's Rushmore, there's a certain annoying preciousness to this film—it's not so consistently wise or amusing as he thinks it is—but it has its moments".[82] Roger Ebert awarded it three-and-a-half stars, admiring how viewers can be ambivalent toward the events in the story.[83] The San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle was enthusiastic, praising the film as "like no other, an epic, depressive comedy, with lots of ironic laughs and a humane and rather sad feeling at its core".[84] Anthony Lane commented in The New Yorker on the setting, which did not truly feel like New York, but "a step-city, or a city-in-law", and said that "the communal oddity" gradually won him over.[85] Peter Travers in Rolling Stone found all the cast great in different ways, while singling out Hackman.[86] L.A. Weekly's Manohla Dargis wrote it had enough laughs to be classified as a comedy, but it contained "a deep vein of melancholia to its drollery".[87] The Guardian's Joe Queenan embraced it as a "bizarre redemption tale".[8]