★★★★☆
The Tenenbaums live in seedy grandeur and are a family of geniuses: the dodgy patriarch Royal is played by Gene Hackman; the mother by Anjelica Huston; the financial whizz kid Chas by Ben Stiller; the tennis prodigy Richie by Luke Wilson. Last but not least, the adopted Margot, a nine-fingered budding playwright, is played by Gwyneth Paltrow, pale as ice in a fox-fur coat and smoking heroically. It’s one of her weirdest and best performances, as she goes on an outlandish sexual odyssey round the world and ends up with a bearded older husband, amusingly downplayed by Bill Murray.
With an omniscient narrator (Alec Baldwin) and mass emotional breakdown that must be tidied by the end, the spaghetti-stranded plot is expertly untangled by Wes Anderson. His brother Eric Chase Anderson creates the detail of the dalmatian mice cages, the pink silk damask wallpaper, the gold radiators, the mustard rotary phones, and even Margot’s knitted glove with the mysteriously missing finger matching her own. The result is as verbally astute as it is visually hilarious — a movie that’s worth pausing for a minute, or an hour, to fully take in a scene.
A particularly lovely edition of The Royal Tenenbaums is out on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection and includes a sketchbook for the intricate set design of the Tenenbaums’ New York mansion. “This contains more perhaps unnecessary visual detail than all my previous films combined,” admitted Anderson, as he turned each room into a shrine to its character’s particular lunacy.