Running time: 108 minutes
Starring: Gene Hackman, Angelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Bill Murray, Luke Wilson, Danny Glover
Rating 7 out of 10
Director Wes Anderson created one of the most unique and distinctive movies of the late 90s with his brilliant second feature Rushmore, a film which was lauded by all those who saw it but which unfortunately received a limited release. If you haven't seen it go and rent it immediately. Now he returns with a star-filled follow-up (one can imagine most of Hollywood beating a path to his door after seeing Rushmore): it's a comedy, a drama, and it's certainly quirky and inventive. However, here is a film which suffers from not being quite as funny as it thinks it is, and one which, for a great deal of its running time, sacrifices cohesion and plot in favour of navel-gazing examinations of characters who may be idiosyncratic but lack any real credibility.
A bohemian family living in metropolitan America, the Tenenbaums are an offbeat and unusual gang. Royal Tenenbaum (Hackman) and his wife Etheline bring up their three children at home and instil varying degrees of artistic, commercial and sporting success into them. Thus Chas (Stiller) turns out to be a highly successful businessman, running his office from home from a young age, Margot (Paltrow) writes her first play for her 11th birthday, and Richie (Luke Wilson) is a prodigious tennis champion who eventually becomes one of the world's leading players. When Etheline and Royal separate the family drifts apart: Chas, now a grown-up widower, worries furiously about the safety of his children; Richie, disillusioned with the tennis circuit, travels the world on various cargo ships, and Margot lives a depressed life married to psychiatrist Raleigh (Murray).
When Royal learns that Etheline plans to marry her accountant Sherman (Glover) he is aghast and feigns cancer in an attempt to elicit sympathy and move back into the house. Slowly, the three children all return to the homestead. The film then becomes a family drama: how will this dysfunctional lot of over-achievers manage to live together?
Anyone who is familiar with the novels of John Irving will start to have alarm bells going off very shortly after the beginning of this film. For all the desperate attempts at originality, the Tenenbaums are little more than an updated Berry family from The Hotel New Hampshire or an extended variation of Garp and his mother in The World According to Garp. But whereas Irving suffuses his characters with requisite kookiness as well as driving the plot forward, Anderson seems to have spent a great deal of this film inventing strange things for his characters to do in the hope that the humour will cover any gaping holes in the dramatic action.
For the most part, he fails and to many eyes The Royal Tenenbaums will come across as a rather pretentious affair. Given the strength of the cast it's not surprising that the quality of acting is very good but it is Hackman, as the increasingly desperate father, who stands head and shoulders above them all. A chain-smoking, insecure and neurotic figure, his achievement marks what the film should have been, but it is eventually nothing more than a great disappointment.
A bohemian family living in metropolitan America, the Tenenbaums are an offbeat and unusual gang. Royal Tenenbaum (Hackman) and his wife Etheline bring up their three children at home and instil varying degrees of artistic, commercial and sporting success into them. Thus Chas (Stiller) turns out to be a highly successful businessman, running his office from home from a young age, Margot (Paltrow) writes her first play for her 11th birthday, and Richie (Luke Wilson) is a prodigious tennis champion who eventually becomes one of the world's leading players. When Etheline and Royal separate the family drifts apart: Chas, now a grown-up widower, worries furiously about the safety of his children; Richie, disillusioned with the tennis circuit, travels the world on various cargo ships, and Margot lives a depressed life married to psychiatrist Raleigh (Murray).
When Royal learns that Etheline plans to marry her accountant Sherman (Glover) he is aghast and feigns cancer in an attempt to elicit sympathy and move back into the house. Slowly, the three children all return to the homestead. The film then becomes a family drama: how will this dysfunctional lot of over-achievers manage to live together?
Anyone who is familiar with the novels of John Irving will start to have alarm bells going off very shortly after the beginning of this film. For all the desperate attempts at originality, the Tenenbaums are little more than an updated Berry family from The Hotel New Hampshire or an extended variation of Garp and his mother in The World According to Garp. But whereas Irving suffuses his characters with requisite kookiness as well as driving the plot forward, Anderson seems to have spent a great deal of this film inventing strange things for his characters to do in the hope that the humour will cover any gaping holes in the dramatic action.
For the most part, he fails and to many eyes The Royal Tenenbaums will come across as a rather pretentious affair. Given the strength of the cast it's not surprising that the quality of acting is very good but it is Hackman, as the increasingly desperate father, who stands head and shoulders above them all. A chain-smoking, insecure and neurotic figure, his achievement marks what the film should have been, but it is eventually nothing more than a great disappointment.
