Editorial notes:
In February 2009, Shai starts his rich blogging career with a blog dedicated to reviewing Wes Anderson films. Of the five posts written between February 2009 and April 2012 and dedicated to this topic, four are written on the blog and one is found in Shai’s Google Drive, perhaps written there with the intention of copying it across at a later stage.
This specific post was found in ‘Draft’ mode in the original blog and may be incomplete. It is published here in its original state. It was last edited on 18/02/2009.
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) is Wes Anderson’s third feature film and tells the story of the Tenenbaum family, especially the children whom due to various events have transformed from brilliant child prodigies into (still impressive) neurotic wrecks. Various circumstances see the children (Ben Stiller [Chas], Gwyneth Paltrow [Margot], Luke Wilson [Richie], and neighbour Owen Wilson [Eli Cash]) return to the home of their mother (Anjelica Huston [Etheline]), and are soon visited upon by their (largely) estranged father, Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman), who proclaims that he is dying . (Bill Murray plays a role as a famous neurologist and Paltrow’s husband).
Eli: I wish you’d’ve done this for me when I was a kid.
Richie: But you didn’t have a drug problem then.
Eli: Yeah, but it still would’ve meant a lot to me.
Disordered comments:
The most disturbing scene in the movie is (unsurprisingly) Eli Cash’s suicide attempt. The play of events is such that Eli says “I’m going to kill myself tomorrow”, gives the audience enough time to reflect (no one kills themselves tomorrow, everything’ll be fine, he’s just being dramatic), and then without warning Eli cuts himself. Fuck.
In my mind this movies had higher ambitions than its predecessors (Bottle Rocket and Rushmore) – display the crater remnants of greatness [apparently the family has its basis in a family from the late J.D. Salinger’s fiction – the Glass family]. Perhaps for this reason too, it doesn’t achieve its intentions to the degree that his other movies do.
To a certain extent, all of Anderson’s movies are about the poignancy of the individual (or at least, a particular type of individual), and their attempts to form channels of communication with others. This is most obvious in Wes Anderson’s first two movies and again in The Darjeeling Limited, (it is also true for The Life Aquatic even though in that instance the pathos of the characters at times is overshadowed by the intensity of the mise-en-scène).
