THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS []
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry – the year’s best movie. Running time: 110 minutes. Rated R (profanity, nudity, drugs). At the Lincoln Square and the Union Square; more theaters next week.
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HOLLYWOOD has delivered its best Christmas gift 11 days early – “The Royal Tenenbaums,” a ruefully hilarious, star-bright, faux-literary portrait of a highly dysfunctional family set in a storybook New York.
Think the Addams Family meets J.D. Salinger’s Glass family, with a little John Irving and Eloise thrown in for good measure. With a title and elegant opening narration (spoken by Alec Baldwin) that evokes “The Magnificent Ambersons” and mock chapter headings complete with character drawings, it’s a classy, if twisted, treat.
Fulfilling the promise he showed in “Rushmore,” director Wes Anderson expertly sketches the sad story of the three Tenenbaum children, prodigies whose accomplishments cease to become quite so prodigious when their father, Royal (Gene Hackman), abruptly walks out on them and their mother, Etheline (Anjelica Huston), when they’re barely in their teens.
Twenty years later, real estate tycoon Chas (Ben Stiller) is an anxiety-ridden basket case who holds midnight fire drills for his two young sons, Ari and Uzi (Grant Rosenmeyer and Jonah Meyerson) – all three wear red sweatsuits, all the time – in the wake of his wife’s death in a plane crash.
His sister Margot – who Royal never let anyone forget was adopted – was once a promising playwright. But now she’s a kohl-rimmed depressive who locks herself in the bathroom when she isn’t cuckolding her eccentric neurologist husband (Bill Murray) by sleeping with Eli Cash (Owen Wilson), a goofy author of bad western novels with a serious drug habit.
Eli, a sort of Tenenbaum wannabe with a best seller to prove it, is the best friend of the third sibling, the hirsute Richie (played by Owen Wilson’s real-life brother, Luke Wilson). Richie, a one-time tennis star who secretly lusts after his adopted sister, has banished himself to a never-ending round-the-world cruise since he blew the U.S. Open after Margo’s wedding.
Chas decides to move himself and the kids into the upper Manhattan brownstone where he grew up – despite the fact that his mother, an archaeologist, is entertaining a marriage proposal from her longtime accountant, Henry (Danny Glover).
His jealous siblings soon follow, along with the prodigal Royal – a disbarred lawyer who’s been thrown out of his hotel for nonpayment. He isn’t exactly given a royal welcome, even when he starts claiming he’s dying – a scam in which he’s abetted by the family servant (Kumar Pallana) and an elevator operator (Seymour Cassel) who poses as Royal’s doctor.
Hackman delivers an Oscar-worthy tour de force as the roguish Royal, who will pilfer your heart as he reaches out to the extended clan for redemption – a montage where he teaches his overprotected grandchildren to ride on garbage trucks and shoplift is a classic.
The rest of the cast is superb as well, and Luke Wilson is particularly outstanding as the suicidal Richie.
Anderson, who collaborated on the script (as in his previous films) with his college buddy Owen Wilson, gives everyone some of the best dialogue heard in a recent movie.
“The Royal Tenenbaums,” which was shot at many unfamiliar locations around the city and boasts deliberately skewed geography, is possibly the most quintessential New York film since “Manhattan.”