The Royal Tenenbaums

The Royal Tenenbaums is the third Wes Anderson film I've seen, and probably the best. What I think puts it over the top above Rushmore is what Peter Travers described in his review. He said that the film is better "not because its cast is starrier but because the film has an accessible maturity." This is an important point. Rushmore is memorably funny, but with this film the seriousness aspect of Wes Anderson's movies has come to match the humor and make something more complicated. Things start out spiffy, but time and discord split the family up into a sprawling wreck. It becomes something kind of comparable to Nashville, where we see the inhabitants of the film interact and live out their crises and relationships. It doesn't suffer from the sprawling messiness of Altman's film, though, since everything is closely interconnected and not as detached from the viewer. With its hands-on auteur feel, there is a soul central to the film. The story is then set in an ironically storybook-like setting, as the narrative awkwardly jumps from humorous to bleak. Many of the shots feel like they belong in a children's book, with dense, colorful sets and framing that hones in on the principal characters.







The whole film is a mood piece, with music buoying it up and dragging it down at each turn. This roller-coaster existence for the characters is an important contrast to Rushmore; though the protagonist there does have some 'troubles', the bigger bumps in this film help to humanize and explain how the stylized, caricatured characters that Wes Anderson loves have come to be. It provides a reason for the wackiness that we see, and makes it funny and sad. The Royal Tenenbaums is a strange film, and I'm not sure what sort of a conclusion I would make about it, but it was certainly my favorite of those by Wes Anderson that I saw.