The Royal Tenenbaums

The extraordinary critical reception afforded 1998’s Rushmore has lent its director Wes Anderson something approaching wunderkind status. It’s a promise he largely delivers on with this, his first Hollywood outing.

The Royal Tenenbaums is clever, likeable and often funny – it’s by no means the life-changing masterpiece you may have been led to believe, but there’s no arguing with it while it lasts.

The plot centres on siblings Chas (Ben Stiller), Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Richie (Luke Wilson), all former child prodigies who are now finding adulthood heavy going. Chas is haunted and increasingly paranoid after his wife has been killed in a plane crash; Margot is a terminally depressed playwright in a fraught marriage to a half-mad psychologist (Bill Murray); and Richie is a former world tennis champ whose career has run aground in mysterious circumstances.

No sooner have the Tenenbaums landed on their mother’s (Anjelica Huston) doorstep than their long-estranged father (Gene Hackman) also turns up, having been fucked out of his digs. Clearly hell-bent on reconciling matters with his family, he fakes terminal illness and persuades his wife to take him back for his ‘last few weeks’.

What unfolds is a sweet, sensitively-acted and poigant affair, marred only by occasional over-reliance on the inherent hilarity of a straight expressionless face. It’s not hard to see why Anderson’s dialogue-driven, straightforward style has gone down so well with Stateside critics driven demented by the deafening volume and blood-thirst of most of its market rivals – but there remains a suspicion that he trades a bit too heavily on ‘deadpan’ and deliberate ‘quirkiness’.

That said, The Royal Tenenbaums certainly deserves two hours of your time.