22. Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
It is the last great Wes Anderson film, and sadly may also be the last great Wes Anderson film.
It is the last great Wes Anderson film, and sadly may also be the last great Wes Anderson film.
The precipitous decline into neurotic hording that has spoiled the consummate auteur's work since The Royal Tenenbaums (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou in 2004, The Darjeeling Limited in 2007 and this year's Fantastic Mr. Fox) can most easily be attributed to the departure of Owen Wilson as Anderson’s writing partner. The bewildered innocence of Bottle Rocket’s Dignan and Max Fischer’s wound-concealing hubris in Rushmore have been supplanted by a savage, unforgiving wit that inches out most recognizably human emotions. After Tenenbaums, an inverse gravity has taken hold in the Anderson universe, with knick-knacks and tchochkes occupying the films' center and the human beings marooned at the periphery. His films have, with the aid of recent collaborators (and navel-gazing filmmakers in their own right) Roman Coppola and Noah Baumbach, become so insular and mean-spirited as to be uninviting for audiences looking to engage with anything beyond the director's contempt for his characters or his penchant for obnoxiously superfluous detail. Tenenbaums was the last film he's made that felt like it existed beyond his bedroom walls.
The Royal Tenenbaums is an ambitious, funny, warmhearted, thoroughly original and clever film that created its own vision of a timeless New York City (rivaling, in its purity, Kubrick's dream of the city in Eyes Wide Shut) without forsaking the actuality of the soon-to-be-suffering metropolis. Anderson’s melancholic, autumnal Big Apple was the perfect American Fantasy for 2001, preserving our iconic city’s capacity for self-definition and eschewing its miseries in as unassuming a manner as possible. The intimately epic saga of a once-regal family of near-geniuses whose talents and identities have begun to fade, The Royal Tenenbaums sports all of Anderson's now-restrictive trademarks (eclectic pop soundtrack, a cruelly dry wit with an absurd twinge and an immensely deliberate production design) without succumbing to their narrative limitations. It was supposed to signal the arrival of a filmmaker whose eye for character and design were equal in strength, coming into his own as an authentic American voice; it now seems like the last gasp of a once-promising collaboration.
Each member of the Tenenbaum clan is lovingly and carefully assembled, and, fittingly, each performer (Gene Hackman, Ben Stiller, Anjelica Huston, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke and Wilson, Danny Glover and Alec Baldwin as narrator) has arguably never been better. Their shared history has the breadth of a novel and the punch of a short story. Anderson's characters since have tended to be monomaniacal cads surrounded by sycophantic morons; they elicit neither sympathy nor interest. The characters of Tenenbaums, however, are fraught with humility, distrust and love for one another in a manner that is genuinely moving and bracingly funny.
The film may also hold the decade's best soundtrack cue: as eldest son Richie Tenenbaum recovers from a ghastly suicide attempt, he checks himself out of the hospital and boards, still clad in hospital-issue scrubs, a New York City bus to the tune of Nick Drake's ethereal invocation "Fly". The stone-faced Richie returning home to his frayed clan is perfectly synchronized with Drake intoning "please / give me a second grace / please / give me a second face". It's a desire for turned corners and new leaves that inspires smarting familiarity.
How depressing it is to think that Anderson may be long out of perfect moments such as this, let alone films, such as this one and its two predecessors, that are so full of them (1). Here's hoping, however, that he allows himself a second grace.
1 - Those would be his debut Bottle Rocket (1996), a comedic heist movie possessed by a mischievous charm and Rushmore (1999), his comic masterpiece detailing a fuzzy love triangle between a kindergarten teacher, a prep school overachiever and a depressive tycoon.
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