ship just didn’t connect—or maybe it connected too well. All I absorbed was the underlying theme of loss. The movie’s mannered charm—its impassive insouciance, its silliness, even its brilliant design—felt distant and yet unbearably sad. Its twentieth anniversary finds New York once again under siege, in the grip of a worldwide pandemic. Revisiting the film now, The Royal Tenenbaums elicits my appreciation without resistance. Maybe because we’ve all been living inside our heads, the movie’s literary affect, its quirks and oddities, feels in sync with the weirdness of life in quarantine. Its melancholic off-kilter vision of New York feels oddly normal, seen at a time when reality itself has been knocked sideways. How fitting to have the film’s storybook narration delivered with deadpan edginess by Alec Baldwin, the actor we now associate as the comic stand-in for our disgraced ex-president. How strangely delightful to see Gwyneth Paltrow, avatar of Goop Health, as Margot Tenenbaum, staring at the world with unblinking intensity through eyes ringed with thick smudgy liner, smoking unfiltered Sweet Afton cigarettes, an extinct Irish brand. But then, it’s no surprise that movies strike us differently at different times in our lives. As Oscar Wilde said, “All criticism is a form of
autobiography.” The same can be said for filmmaking. I began to wonder: Where did The Royal Tenenbaums fit into the trajectory of Wes Anderson’s oeuvre, currently consisting of nine feature films (with another about to be released) and several shorts? While Anderson’s talent was evident from the start, it was The Royal Tenenbaums that established the director’s visual imprint, the style that illustrates a persistent hope for fairy-tale endings despite the understanding that reality can be grim indeed. Frame after frame is stuffed with whimsical oddities and eccentric characters whose manner could easily be replicated in a cartoon. (As would happen later, with Anderson’s marvelous stop-motion film adaptation of the Roald Dahl children’s novel, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and the heart-wrenching Isle of Dogs.) Anderson has become the object of cultish fascination, both for his works and his public persona. Over time, he has come to look like a character he might have created for one of his films, a lanky beanpole dressed in patterned shirts, neckties, and too-small jackets, usually corduroy or tweed, all presented in a distinctive color palette, even at 51 looking like a gawky adolescent boy wearing his big brother’s hand-me-downs.
The cult is hardly an exclusive club. Many of his movies have done well financially [The Grand Budapest Hotel is the top example, earning $172.9 million worldwide], meaning considerable numbers of people have watched them. But it is still a rarefied one. While fans (including me) treasure this cockeyed genius who finds beauty and humor amid existential crises, others can find his films too precious, too trapped inside the hothouse of their creator’s idiosyncratic brain. A.O. Scott of the New York Times had liked Rushmore but found The Royal Tenenbaums annoying. “Like the songs and the reiterated portrait-style shots, the witty costumes and gorgeous interiors become suffocating, and the whole enterprise begins to feel more arch than artful, a gilded lily that spoils its perfection by insisting on it,” he wrote. Later, however, the critic succumbed to Anderson’s charms. “As a sometime grumbler and longtime fan, I found myself not only charmed and touched but also moved to a new level of respect,” he wrote in his review of The Grand Budapest Hotel. He hasn’t been alone in his evolving admiration. Anderson’s scores on Rotten Tomatoes— where audiences weigh in along with critics— have steadily increased over the years. MARCH—APRIL 2021 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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