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In my last column, you found out that I have a special place in my heart for traditionally animated movies. Now I will reveal another type of picture that I love. While I do not discriminate against any genre in particular, I have an inclination for ensemble pictures. Crash, Monty Python, the Ocean’s Eleven series (sans Twelve), Pulp Fiction, Love Actually, the list can go on and on. So when I watched The Royal Tenenbaums, I couldn’t help but be excited with such an extensive cast. With Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, and Gwyneth Paltrow, Wes Anderson created quite an impressive lineup for himself - and those are just the first-billed actors.

Although dry humor is subjective and I find it very hit-or-miss, Anderson hits every mark head-on as he satirizes the traditional American family through the dysfunctional Tenenbaums. Separated yet never divorced, Royal Tenenbaum (the wonderful Hackman), a disbarred attorney, has long been exiled from his impressive family mansion to an ultra-luxury hotel suite. Not having the right knack for words, his wife Etheline (Huston), an archeologist, takes care of their three overachieving genius children - who are not really children at all. Chas (Ben Stiller) is a financial expert, Richie (Luke Wilson) is a tennis Olympian, and the adopted Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a playwright prodigy. Cut to 22 years later and the Tenenbaums are only a mirror of their former selves. Chas lost his wife in a plane accident and is an overbearing safety nut to his two children. Richie, who cracked under pressure at a tennis tournament, now lives on a boat traveling the world. Margot married Raleigh St. Clair (Bill Murray spoofing Freud) and is in a serious state of depression, having not written a play in years. But when the financially and internally troubled Royal picks up on the information that his wife has been proposed to by her accountant (Danny Glover), he tries to make amends as the family through circumstance is all under the same roof once again.

With such rich and absorbing characters, I was about to hop onto Amazon to order the novel it was adapted from. Only thing is that there was no book to begin with. In a novel idea (pun intended), Wes Anderson formatted the film like a book with frequent cuts to pages showing the chapter and even some text about the upcoming scene for those who like pausing their DVD players. Much of the dialogue is spoken through voice-over by a mysterious regal-voiced narrator (Alec Baldwin). This technique helps set-up a scene in only seconds and gives dense background information on the quirky characters.

Anderson, for my money, is one of today’s most unconventional and un-disappointing filmmakers. He once said, “I want to try not to repeat myself. But then I seem to do it continuously in my films. It's not something I make any effort to do. I just want to make films that are personal, but interesting to an audience.” However, Anderson’s work always seems insightful and worth multiple viewings to spot the hidden context. The self-referential nature of his films makes them all that much better to dissect. Much like Frank Capra, where Anderson repeats himself is in tone. Anderson's movies always have internally tormented characters miserably set in happy bright exterior surfaces. Just watch, for instance, the scene where the chain-smoking Margot with her black as coal eyeliner soaks in a pearly white bubbly bathtub.

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