Part of Wednesdays With Wes
Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) and his wife Etheline (Anjelica Huston) had three children — Chas, Margot and Richie — and then they separated. Chas (Ben Stiller) started buying real estate in his early teens and seemed to have an almost preternatural understanding of international finance. Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) was a playwright and received a Braverman Grant of $50,000 in 9th ninth grade. Richie (Luke Wilson) was a junior champion tennis player and won the U.S. Nationals three years in a row. Virtually all memory of the brilliance of the young Tenenbaums was subsequently erased by two decades of betrayal, failure and disaster. THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS is a hilarious, touching and brilliantly stylized study of melancholy and redemption from Wes Anderson.
“Wes Anderson is an authentic original — an eccentric and heretical talent…. In a film that verges on greatness, it is a sign of terrific faith, as well as of Anderson’s promise as a director, that when one of the characters in THE ROYAL TENENBAUM wears hospital pajamas after a detour into grief, the words over his heart read ‘recovery area.’ —Manohla Dargis, L.A. Weekly (Dec 12, 2001) “In effect, THE ROYAL TENEBAUMS creates an alternate universe where every taxi is a battered gypsy cab and even a North Dakota clinic overlooks the wintry Hudson River. More than anything, the movie is redolent of late autumn in New York. The weather is overcast and chilly, but the human relations, however neurotic, have a cheery glow—it’s not for nothing that the family name means Christmas tree.” —J. Hoberman, Village Voice (Dec 11, 2001)
