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.In Anderson and Wilson s story,the mother s marriage goes ahead, with the eventual blessing even of her ex-husband, and the attempted suicide of Richie Tenenbaum not only fails butleads to familial reconciliation.Like Paul Thomas Anderson and David O.Russell, Anderson and Wilson have an unsentimental view of the damagethat can be wrought by nuclear family life.But also like them, the writersof The Royal Tenenbaums are ultimately more interested in forgiveness thancondemnation.The narrative conceit this time out is literary.The movie not only beginswith a shot of a book called The Royal Tenenbaums (and an obligatory handopening the front cover), it also has an omniscient third-person narrator (thevoice of Alec Baldwin).Rather than the five acts of Rushmore, it has 10 chap-ters, plus a prologue and epilogue, each announced with a title page.All ofwhich fits its fiercely literary milieu, a world of people conversant with booksand book reviews, newspapers and journals, where even the (relatively) disad-vantaged neighbor boy, Eli Cash, grows up to be a successful novelist and aprofessor of literature.But at the same time, it was Anderson s most imagina-tively visual movie yet, with each character, room, building, and prop fretfullydesigned and arranged to the tiniest detail.Even more than in Rushmore,where he relied in part on the readymade gravitas of St.John s School, Ander-son in Tenenbaums created an entire alternate world, a grown-up storybooksetting populated by characters in varying stages of arrested development.As usual, there is vagueness about the film s time period.The charactersseem contemporary, but the wardrobes, hairstyles, and design details area hodgepodge of 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s references, given coherence bynothing more than Anderson s personal taste.An enlightening short featureon Anderson directed by Albert Maysles and included in the supplementalDVD with Criterion s Tenenbaums package shows the director obsessingover interior paint colors and carpet patterns for the Tenenbaums house.Hisideas about clothing were so specific that he hired couturiers like Fendi andLacoste to make exactly what he wanted.Even more than most directors,Anderson uses costumes as an extension of his characters.Like Dignan withhis yellow jumpsuit in Bottle Rocket and Max with his blue blazer in Rushmore,the three Tenenbaum siblings are defined by what they wear: Chas s red adidastracksuit, Margot s fur coat and black eyeliner, Richie s tennis-pro sweatbandsand sunglasses.They don t dress like they grew up in the same decade, muchless the same household, but the clashing styles are really an externalizationof deeper personal differences, a visual shorthand for the chasms within thefamily. WES ANDERSON 129The movie s prologue traces the origins of those chasms to the siblingschildhoods, with their parents separation, the very different relationships allthree establish early on with their father, and their early public notoriety asa family of prodigies (or geniuses, as their mother Etheline calls them in abook she writes about them).Their precocious achievements are detailed inone of the film s several montage sequences, by now established as an Ander-son trademark, and set with by-now familiar savvy to an elegiac, orchestralarrangement of Hey Jude (a song written for a child, as Anderson certainlyknows).But the prologue ends with the narrator reporting that in fact, vir-tually all memory of the brilliance of the young Tenenbaums had been erasedby two decades of betrayal, failure and disaster. Where both Bottle Rocket andRushmore traced arcs of their characters dreams from conception throughexecution to disillusion The Royal Tenenbaums all takes place on the declin-ing side of that arc.The dreams and successes are dispensed with in the firstfive minutes, leaving the body of the movie as a study in disappointment.So the Tenenbaums are sad, individually and collectively.They are also,like all of Anderson s protagonists, somewhat ridiculous.Sketched as bundlesof talents, hobbies, habits, and neuroses rather than fully articulated charac-ters, they are too vibrant and quirky to be called two-dimensional but stillsomething less than fleshed out.They aren t cartoons; more like slightly elu-sive figures from a New Yorker magazine cover, suggested by flashes of colorand angled faces and bodies.They serve the purposes of the movie, becauseAnderson is as interested in evoking an imaginary place as a particular setof personalities.He compensates for the thinness of these sketchpad charac-terizations by filling up the frame with them.If you count just Royal andhis children, the movie has four main characters to start with
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