All happy families are functional; every dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own way, although it may think of itself as perfectly functional, and it may even end up happier, in its own way, than one of the happy ones. How lucky it is that Tolstoy did not live to see "The Royal Tenenbaums," a movie designed to revise all theories of domestic harmony. If Anna Karenina had been born a Tenenbaum, she would never have jumped in front of the train. She would have lit a cigarette and put on the Rolling Stones.
The setting is elusive. The time is the late seventies or early eighties, but I wouldn't swear to it. The place is New York, only it isn't. The director, Wes Anderson, shot most of the film in this city, yet the New York that he came up with stands at one remove from the real thing—a step-city, or a city-in-law, somewhere more crumbling and crenellated than what we are used to, and where the cabs are dying of rust. And here is a house as tall as a story: was it really built, you ask yourself, or was it drawn by an eager child, then painted and peopled accordingly? It has salmon-pink walls up the staircase, a danceless ballroom, and a tent of welcoming yellow pitched in the living room. This is the domain of the Tenenbaums, the daylight answer to the Addamses: the patriarch, Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman), his estranged wife, Etheline (Anjelica Huston), and their sons, Chas (Ben Stiller), a widowed tycoon in a fuzzy red tracksuit, and Richie (Luke Wilson)—hairy, headbanded, and dumb with discontent. He was a tennis star of international clout, until one day he froze and folded on the court; the cause remains cloudy, although it may involve his sister, Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), with whom, being a good Tenenbaum, he happens to be in love. This isn't strictly incest, because Margot was adopted. Nevertheless, as her father points out, "it's still frowned upon—but what isn't, these days?"
I love that line; it's at once breezy and nostalgic, with a certain screw-you insouciance around the edges, and Hackman tosses it off with his growling bonhomie, relishing his status as the elder statesman who doubles as a Young Turk. Anderson plays a handy game of age-swapping in this film. Wisdom and skill are the property of the children, whereas Royal races over the threshold of seniority with the grinning glee of a kid. (He disapproves of the risk-free, no-fun atmosphere that is breathed by Chas's young sons, and when he spirits them out for a spree—swimming, go-carting, hitching a ride on the side of a garbage truck—it is hard to decide who enjoys it more.) By far the worst epoch, we are led to understand, is the prime of life, the traditional hotbed of achievement. Take an advertising executive to this movie and he will choke on his Coke. All the Tenenbaum offspring were prodigies: Margot was a playwright, Richie was a racquet on legs, and Chas, as we are informed in the voice-over, "started buying real estate in his early teens." But there's the joke. Hollywood loves a genius, but these folk are exgeniuses, has-beens and has-dones, and their best days have faded by the time the movie begins. Gwyneth Paltrow gives Margot the faraway haze of a spent force; with her eyes so rich in mascara that she must have been taking tips from a panda, and with the sad, swish perfection of her Fendi mink, she seems smaller and more defenseless than her earlier self, whom we glimpse in a flurry of flashbacks. Paltrow, like others in the cast, bites hard into this role, as if starved by most of the work she's been getting lately. The only performer who seems truly relaxed is Owen Wilson, whose Bob Hope schnozzle and wide, if secretive, smile have become reliable tools to cheer an audience up. Not only does he play Eli Cash, the boyhood pal of Richie and the adult swain of Margot; he also co-wrote the movie with Anderson, and he gets to wear a cowboy hat. No wonder the guy looks pleased.
Does "The Royal Tenenbaums" hang together and complete its mission? For all the funny glamour of its retro styling, is it more than a freakorama? To begin with, I wasn't sure; it was hard to establish what advance it marked on the majestic deadpan of "Rushmore," Anderson's previous venture. (Bill Murray plays in both movies, but his new role, as Margot's obliging husband, is far more subdued.) Slowly, however, the communal oddity of the new picture began to hit home. For some reason, I caught it first in the soundtrack, notably in the sharp sprinkling of Ravel that Anderson throws over his chosen people—a pizzicato passage from the String Quartet which tightens our sense of the Tenenbaums as unpredictable toys, either running down or whizzing out of control. Why else would Royal fake a fatal illness, if not to move back into the palatial home? It is as though he were contriving to smuggle a little love—that most contraband of goods—into the household from which it has apparently been banished. Even when his impatient relations tip him out again, he declares that the last six days have been among the finest of his life. A voice-over adds, "Immediately after making this statement, Royal realized that it was true."
If you can explain the strange effect of that line, you're doing better than I am. The whole tone of the film is like Paltrow's eyes: a steady gleam, rimmed in darkness, and only a blink away from mad. Look out for the fabulous shot near the end, after Eli has crashed his sports car into the side of the house: the camera travels along the scarlet flank of a fire truck, leaping smoothly from one family member to the next and eavesdropping on their respective conversations—Royal befriending a dalmatian crossbreed, for instance, or the staid Henry Sherman (Danny Glover), Etheline's gentleman suitor, explaining the legal and tax implications of the crash. Each character, as ever, is tucked into a shell of his or her obsessions, and yet the filming itself—the grace of Anderson's draftsmanship, as it were—binds the figures together into a team. The movie has no climax, no thundercrack of redemption, and the death that rounds it off is no more grievous, or unexpected, than the rain that drops politely on the casket. The best way to approach "The Royal Tenenbaums," perhaps, would be to visit your bookshelf and open your Edward Gorey; spend an evening with some of his writings and drawings, rub against the velvet of his lugubrious wit, and you will be ready for Royal and the clan.
How do you cast Stockard Channing? She's such a spunky presence that the camera doesn't always know where to look, as though fearing the ferocity of her glance. Those rounded features still bear a vestige of the upbeat girlishness that won her the part of Betty Rizzo in "Grease," and yet so readily do they bunch and pucker with worry that Channing seems too grown up, too wise to the layout of life's trapdoors, to be at ease in modern movies. If I could, I would spirit her back to the days of Irene Dunne and Mary Astor—chipper, neat-faced dames whose powers of reaction, like Channing's, were comedy-quick, even when there was nothing to laugh about.
In "The Business of Strangers," Channing plays Julie Styron, the vice-president of an investment company. That, at any rate, is her position at the start; by the end, she has been not just professionally enhanced but emotionally wiped out. Dry, deliberate, and divorced from a husband who wanted children, of all things, Julie measures out her life in hotel rooms. The young writer-director, Patrick Stettner, knows how to dramatize an idea on a lo-cal budget; not for him the roar and bray of planes taking off but a simple abstraction of the grass beneath a jet, combed in the downdraft like green corn. On the other hand, I sensed the familiar arm twist that accompanies almost every film about business; if corporate existence were honestly as hellish and numbing as most artists—not just movie directors—would like it to be, then nobody of any calibre would go into it in the first place. We are told in no uncertain terms how Julie feels about her work, but we never really learn what she does.
When a young tech assistant, Paula Murphy (Julia Stiles), fails to arrive for a presentation, Julie fires her. But planes get cancelled, and the two women are stranded in an airport hotel, with nothing in common but an empty evening and a full flow of Scotch. "That's a manly drink," says Paula, who, far from being pissed at losing her job, feels free to rib Julie for being stuffy, middle-aged, and cramped. Things turn nasty when Nick Harris (Frederick Weller), a feral headhunter (he prefers "placement provider"), winds up in Julie's room. Paula reveals that he once raped a friend of hers, and, egged on by Julie, she exacts revenge. Looking back at the film, I don't buy all this, but no matter; Channing is so stormy, so keen to unleash her resentments, that for an hour or so you do believe in Julie—in all the wild words that she scrawls on the body of the half-naked Nick, and the foxy right hook that she throws at Paula in return for a simple slap. If Patrick Stettner wants to be the Strindberg of the spreadsheet, he's going about it the right way; think of the original Miss Julie, taking fright in the clutches of her inferior. Just like the new one. ♦
