Royal Tenenbaums, The
Royal Tenenbaums, The | ||
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Director: | Wes Anderson | Actors: | Gene Hackman (as Royal O'Reilly Tenenbaum), Anjelica Huston (as Dr. Etheline 'Ethel' Tenenbaum-Sherman), Gwyneth Paltrow (as Margot Helen Tenenbaum), Ben Stiller (as Chas Tenenbaum), Luke Wilson (as Richie 'Baumer' Tenenbaum), Owen Wilson (as Elijah 'Eli' Cash), Danny Glover (as Henry Sherman), Bill Murray (as Raleigh St. Clair), Alec Baldwin (as Narrator (voice)), Seymour Cassel (as Dusty), Kumar Pallana (as Pagoda), Grant Rosenmeyer (as Ari Tenenbaum), Jonah Meyerson (as Uzi Tenenbaum), Aram Aslanian-Persico (as Young Chas Tenenbaum), Irene Gorovaia (as Young Margot Tenenbaum) | Country: | USA | Category: | Comedy | Year: | 2001 |
| Description: | An estranged family of former child prodigies reunites when one of their member announces he has a terminal illness. | Comments: | It was a weird year at the Oscars. They managed, to a greater degree than usual, to nominate the right films, but for the wrong awards. It's easy to look through the list of nominees and find five films more deserving of winning Best Picture than the five official candidates - even if you leave the foreign-language films out of consideration. "The Royal Tenenbaums" (deservedly nominated for its screenplay, otherwise neglected) is one of them. It also boasts subtler and finer art direction than the half-thought-through nominees for that award, and incomparably better cinematography (real widescreen! real Technicolor! - but that's only part of it: we see the characters related meaningfully to their world in every warm, gorgeous shot) than the five lacklustre nominees for THAT award, although to be fair, "The Man Who Wasn't There" was less lacklustre than the rest. But I won't go on. An "ensemble" film of the kind that's becoming all too popular these days, this one doesn't turn into a crossword puzzle: we know at the start how the characters relate to one another (there IS a surprising revelation, sort of, but it isn't there just to startle us; rather, it helps us make sense of what we already know), so we're free to sit back and enjoy the show - those of us who have normal pulses will have already fallen in love with most of the characters during the prologue, anyway. Part of the reason for this is their real and partly unpredictable intelligence. We can't distance ourself from the action (i.e., insulate ourselves from caring) with the smug thought that we're so much smarter than the bozos we're watching. The spoken third-person narration is tactfully handled, there when we need it, absent for long stretches when we don't. (I'll chant it again and again until I'm hoarse: in films, third-person narration, good; first-person, bad.) The colours are lovely. Simply speaking, "The Royal Tenenbaums" is pleasure. It's pleasant to look at, to listen to, to inhabit the world of. It neither insults our intelligence nor (except just once, in a scene which can be justified) present us with something gruesome that we'd rather not see. No wonder modern audiences didn't know what to make of it. P.S. One or two people have claimed that what we're seeing is a play which Margot wrote about her family. Luckily this theory is rubbish. It's a nice touch that we see sentences (and illustrations) from her later book, but these occur as "chapter" headings, not stage directions. My guess is that that book is an honest, private document, not intended for public viewing - and in the world of the fiction, which we do not inhabit, the book WAS private, unseen by ANY outside eyes. And the footage that makes up the meat and bulk of the film has nothing to do with the book (except inasmuch as the book is probably, with one or two trivial exceptions, accurate). What we see is what happens. Don't worry: this is a real film, not some flippant exercise in narrative confusion. P.P.S.: I don't mean to imply that the actual Best Picture candidates were entirely worthless. "A Beautiful Mind", "Gosford Park" and "In the Bedroom", little though there may be to say about any of them, no doubt deserved notice for their acting. "The Fellowship of the Ring" had decent make-up. "Moulin Rouge" had fine costumes, and it was nice to see Catherine Martin accepting an award, looking ten times sexier than any of the actresses she or anyone else had been payed to clothe. A weird night indeed. |
Languages: | English | Subtitles: | Length: | 109 | Video format: | Audio format: | Resolution: | Files sizes: | 1093 |