New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

DVD Spine # 157

“Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What [my] book presupposes is... maybe he didn't.” --Author Eli Cash, discussing his latest effort at a book signing

Opening on December 14, 2001, a mere three months after the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Wes Anderson’s third feature film The Royal Tenenbaums is a work of art that manages to capture, by melancholic happenstance, something resembling the emotional tenor of America at that particular moment (much like Spike Lee’s drama 25th Hour would capture the despair and fallout and idealized hope for some kind of future utopia, when it was released just over a year later). Anderson’s film is set in New York City and was filmed there, but it is not the NYC of easily discernible landmarks or a skyline that had - by that time - been forever altered.

(I feel I should add that I don’t mean to suggest any kind of balanced equation between the real-life horror of 9/11 and the personal and professional travails of a fictional filmic family, simply that in its more fairy tale and/or fantastical moments and in the lingering sadness and rue that underlines even the most comic of images, such as the play by play of tennis star Richie Tenenbaum’s professional meltdown on the court, an appreciation for the fragility of life and the evanescent nature of happiness and security that many became aware of again in those days, finds a mirror in the film’s world).

Anderson intentionally chose to avoid anything that might resemble an iconic city image and molded a cityscape both anachronistic (the gypsy cabs that ailing patriarch Royal Tenenbaum often hails) and geographically tweaked (though it sounds impressive, there is no 375th Street Y). As a result, Anderson wasn’t forced to deal with the dilemma other filmmakers faced that fall - notably Edward Burns and his romantic comedy Sidewalks of New York - of whether or not to hold off on releasing films taking place in NYC and/or to digitally edit out shots of the Twin Towers.

Anderson’s cinematic world is thus already inhabited by an absence of sorts - NYC is rendered as both familiar and yet markedly uncanny - and a sense of something lost which may never be recovered. On the plot level this is echoed in its tragicomic story of a memorably dysfunctional family of prodigies turned n’er do-wells, the hangers-on, family friends and associates caught in their orbit, and the father figure (Royal)’s misguided but ultimately successful effort to reunite them again, even if it means behaving like an “asshole” and/or “son of a bitch” (the first term is Royal’s self-analysis, the second that of the man about to marry Royal’s long-estranged but not-quite-ex Etheline.)

The conceit of the Tenenbaums (screenplay co-written by Anderson with his frequent collaborator and star Owen Wilson, who here plays long-time family friend Eli Cash) owes more than a passing glance to the works of J.D. Salinger, in particular his affectionate tales involving the Glass family, an extended brood of former radio quiz show stars with remarkable genius, piercing insights into human nature, and all too crushing emotional frailties they face as they pass through their precocious moppet phase and quickly enter an adult world they felt ill-equipped for dealing with. What Anderson and Wilson do with this story, however, in its construction and presentation, elevates it beyond simple homage. The pair make every effort to cover most of the creative arts, mixing and matching mediums at will, either inherent in the story being told, or through the mise en scene in which the story unfolds. I doubt this list will be comprehensive but simply considering even a small portion of the ways in which they draw attention to the story they are telling and the myriad manners in which stories can be told helps open new worlds of appreciation for Tenenbaums’ accomplishments.

Continued:       1       2       3       4