The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) ...
| Released: | December 4, 2001 |
| Running Time: | 109 min |
| Cast: | Gene Hackman Anjelica Huston Gwyneth Paltrow Ben Stiller Luke Wilson Owen Wilson Danny Glover Bill Murray |
| Writers: | Wes Anderson |
| Director: | Wes Anderson |
| My Rating | ** |
I really hated this movie ... can you tell by my 2 out of 5 star rating? I think my expectations were just too high before I watched the movie. Normally I love this kind of shtick with the wildly disfunctional family type of plot, but too many of the scenes here just grated on me and being too phoney and just not very interesteing.
It must be me, however, because a lot of people and critics seemed to like this one. Gwyneth is okay in her role as are all the other actors, so I think it's just the way the story unwound that turned me off. It wasn't "believablily" silly it was mostly just silly and totally out to lunch for me.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Plot
The estranged father,
Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman), returns to his family more than a decade later,
faking a case of stomach cancer, after he is evicted from his room at the
Lindbergh Palace Hotel and disbarred from practicing law. The film is the story
of how Royal attempts to come back and maintain his place, whatever is left of
it, within the family.
The siblings of the Tenenbaum family are all highly intelligent and disillusioned, struggling with their own identities. They are loosely based on a rabble of similarly disillusioned siblings from the later books of famed author J.D. Salinger. The Glass family, comprised of seven child-prodigy-turned-adult-misanthrope characters, is the central subject of three of Salinger's five published books, and form the basis for the quirky and unhappy Tenenbaum family, as director Wes Anderson revealed in an interview with Premiere magazine conducted in January 2001.
Trivia
* Some members of
the Tenenbaum family are actually modeled after members of Cinematographer
Robert Yeoman's brother-in-law Walter Karnas' family. Certain small points of
family members were exaggerated to make the character its own. The part of Royal
Tenenbaum was written for Gene Hackman, but written after Walter Karnas himself.
The same goes for the three Tenenbaum children, partially written after three of
the Karnas children.
* Etheline Tenenbaum, played by Anjelica
Huston, was modeled after Wes Anderson's own mother. Anderson's mother similarly
adopted archeology after divorcing her husband. The glasses Etheline wears are
actually Mrs. Anderson's. At one point during filming, Anjelica Huston asked Wes
Anderson if she was, in fact, supposed to be playing his mother.
* Two of the film's characters are thought to be modeled after popular culture icon Nico. The blonde hair and dark mascara of Nico is reflected in the styling of Margot Tenenbaum; additionally, Chas's son Ari shares a name with Nico's son with Alain Delon. The film soundtrack features two songs by Nico: "The Fairest of the Seasons" and "These Days."
* The name Buckley for the dog came from singer/songwriter Jeff Buckley. He's a beagle, which is a tribute to Snoopy from Peanuts.
* The narration and the way the film follows each family member is similar to Fox's canceled acclaimed television sitcom Arrested Development. Jason Bateman, one of the show's stars, described the show as "The Royal Tenenbaums shot like COPS". Arrested Development's creator and head writer Mitchell Hurwitz said that when he saw The Royal Tenenbaums he already had the idea for AD in mind and thought "Well, I guess I won't be doing that" but subsequently changed his mind.
* For several locations, Anderson used run-down
neighborhoods in upper Manhattan. All the exterior shots -- and most of the
interior ones -- of the Tenenbaum house are of a residential building at the
corner of 144th Street and Convent Avenue, just north of City College. The
cemetery scenes were filmed at Trinity Cemetery between 153rd and 155th Streets,
near Riverside Drive.
* The actual name for the movie was inspired
in part, by longtime friend of Wes Anderson, Brian Tenenbaum who has appeared in
several of Anderson's movies in bit parts. In the Royal Tenenbaums he is one of
the paramedics seen at the end of the film.
