"The Royal Tenenbaums"

"Rushmore" director Wes Anderson is more interested in his own precocity than he is in his characters.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Dec. 14, 2001 | "The Royal Tenenbaums" marks Wes Anderson as a director whose heart is in the right place: The problem is that everything else is out of whack.

There's an awkward self-consciousness to the way he strings scenes together, like giant wooden beads, that some critics and fans have hailed as visionary in his previous films, "Bottle Rocket" and, particularly, "Rushmore." But to the rest of us, those scenes don't connect in any meaningful rhythm. And that's only the beginning: Anderson's other hallmarks here are brilliant gags that deflate in the execution, potentially interesting characters that end up so flat they feel as if they'd been cut out of paper, a plot that's all setup and no story. "The Royal Tenenbaums" strives to be ambitious and homey at once, and even though I want to trust that Anderson's impulses are pure, the movie is so calculating that I could only imagine Anderson sitting in some darkened room somewhere, toting up the laughs and tears on a child's chalkboard.

Anderson is the kind of director who, with his quirky awkwardness, puts distance between his movies and the audience instead of collapsing it. Some people enjoy his style and bridge the distance easily; others, like me, may feel that he's more interested in his own precocity than he is in his characters. The charm of his bumptiously lauded 1998 "Rushmore" eluded me, but I will grant that he has a pointed understanding of class issues: He realizes that class-based insecurities are much more interesting (and more deep-rooted) than the favorite topic of so many other young filmmakers, suburban ennui. (In other words, he's not part of the loathsome "I'm so bored out here in my parents' big expensive suburban house" school of filmmaking.)

There's also sincerity in Anderson's approach, if you have the temperament and the energy to look past his constant smirking to see it. "The Royal Tenenbaums," especially, makes that pretty hard work. Gene Hackman is Royal, the taciturn and mostly absentee head of the Tenenbaum family, a neurotically grand bunch that has splintered and fallen on hard times. He and his wife, Etheline (Anjelica Huston), have been separated, though not divorced, for years. Their three offspring, each of whom was a child prodigy, have grown up and left the nest, but all of them feel at sea in the outside world, unable to adjust to its relentless rolling and pitching.

As a kid, Chas (Ben Stiller) started a business breeding Dalmatian mice. He's now a high-roller tycoon with two kids; he's also a crankily grieving but intensely guarded widower. Richie (Luke Wilson) was a tennis champ until, one fateful day, he mysteriously flipped out on the court during the match of his career. Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) wrote an award-winning play at the age of 9. Now she no longer writes and spends much of her time indoors, in her bathtub, hiding her secret smoking habit from her adoring Oliver Sacks-like hubby (Bill Murray).

Circumstances, among them Royal's announcement that he's terminally ill, cause them all to return to the homestead. And although each is acutely aware of his or her miserable childhood, and the neglect and indifference with which Royal treated them (Etheline was always vaguely supportive but distracted), they feel more at home in the big old family house than anywhere else.

Anderson spends a great deal of time introducing the characters and explaining their histories. (There's a voice-over by Alec Baldwin that, "Virgin Suicides"-style, outlines everything we need to know.) Anderson captures an aura of wry mournfulness in these flashback tableaux, particularly the sight of the child version of Margot in a striped sports dress, her hair tucked back with a plastic barrette, tapping away solemnly at one of her plays. Set against an instrumental version of "Hey Jude" -- a song written for a neglected child -- these vignettes establish a delicately morose mood that the rest of the movie doesn't live up to.

For one thing, though it's splashed with color, "The Royal Tenenbaums" is too flat to be vivid. Each shot is like an inert comic-book panel (and without the intentional angularity that Terry Zweigoff achieved in "Ghost World"), in which the characters look like lost foreigners. It's faux folk art.

Next page: Gene Hackman resonates whenever he's on screen