Twee Magazine

Luke Wilson and Gwyneth Paltrow in "The Royal Tenenbaums"

We may never see a film version of the Glass Family, the collection of washed-up former child geniuses essayed by J. D. Salinger in a series of stories starting with 1948's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." But we don't really need to, as Wes Anderson provided his own version of the Glass family with his collection of washed-up former child geniuses in "The Royal Tenenbaums."

Salinger isn't the only source for the film, even if he's the most obvious. Anderson has an omnivore's tastes for influences, all increasingly unexpected. There is a cuckolded husband, played by Bill Murray, and he is based on neurologist Oliver Sacks (which is clear in the original script, which gave him Sacks' lisp and English accent). There is an accountant played Danny Glover as a soft-spoken klutz, but with a wardrobe and goatee lifted from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. There is a neighbor who has made a career for himself as an author of speculative Westerns, played by coauthor Owen Wilson, and he is, in Anderson's words, a "Cormac McCarthy knockoff."

There's an element of collage to the film, as though the whole of the film were pieced together from back issues of "The New Yorker"; unsurprising, as Anderson apparently owns every issue of the publication. And there's an element of the film that displays Anderson and Wilson's obsessive interest in film: The story itself, about a once-great family in decline, owes as much to Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons" as it does Salinger. The role of the film's callow and accidentally cruel patriarch, the tough-talking bon vivant Royal Tenenbaum, was written for 70s film superstar Gene Hackman over the actor's own objections. The film borrows from Robert Altman, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jean-Pierre Melville's film "Les Enfants Terrible." With "Tenenbaums," Anderson revealed himself to be as much a cinematic magpie as Quentin Tarantino, drawing from sources just as broad-ranging; there's even a line of dialogue in the film that borrows from "Witness."

Tarantino's and Anderson's films end up packaging these influences very differently: Tarantino is self-consciously cool, and he has wound up being a great legitimizer of genre films, while Anderson is self-consciously twee, even if he wouldn't use that word, and his sources come squarely from the American middlebrow. This is not meant as a criticism, by the way -- Anderson uses these shared touchstones of American good taste to tell stories of people behaving badly and falling apart in the process. Anderson's characters tend to be damaged, and the exquisiteness of their environment serves to highlight their pain. And while his films often seem set in a world of privilege, this was the first movie of his featuring lead characters who were undeniably privileged. Max Fischer, the main character in "Rushmore," was the striving child of a working-class single father, and Owen Wilson's character in this film has a similar story. He seems to have been raised by his grandmother, attended a Catholic boys school, and has taken aim at the rich kids, as Fischer was instructed to do.

But the Tenenbaums are the film's main characters. There is disgraced former lawyer Royal, alienated from his family, whose mixture of masculine dandiness and old-timey tough guy phrases make him a precursor to "Grand Budapest Hotel's" M. Gustave. There is his never-divorced wife Etheline who, like Anderson's own mother, became an architect after her marriage fell apart, and has raised her children to be geniuses; she is played with understated elegance by Anjelica Huston. There is eldest son Chas, played by Ben Stiller, who displayed an early knack for finance and a later inability to deal with family tragedy.  There is middle child Margot Tenenbaum, who was adopted and never allowed to forget the fact, and had a brief career as a playwright and an adult career as a secret adulterer; she is played with black rimmed eyes and fur coat by Gwyneth Paltrow. And there is youngest son Richie, played by Luke Wilson, who was his father's favorite and briefly a tennis pro, but who has a long unrequited love for Margot that caused him to melt down mid-tennis match.

As with "Rushmore," these characters are all slightly exaggerated and slightly caricatured. All wear signature costumes and grew up in rooms that seem more like stage sets than actual residences. But, as with "Rushmore," these facts allow Anderson and his artistic staff to load the film with telling details. There is, as an example, an unexpected triangle between Etheline, Margot, and Owen Wilson's western author, Eli Cash. And it's not just that Margot is having an affair with Eli, nor that Eli has sent Etheline grades and newspaper clipping for years like she was his surrogate mother. It's also that all three have a fascination with so-called primitive cultures. When we first meet Eli as a boy, he is wearing Apache warpaint, a motif that will recur throughout the film. Margot, in the meanwhile, has a childhood room painted with a faux-African masks and repeatedly writes plays set in jungles. And Etheline has an office filled with woodcuts of various tribesmen, which seems like it would interest an anthropologist rather than an archeologist.

Each has explored this interest in non-European cultures in different ways. Before the start of the film, Margot was something of a sexual tourist around the world, while, during the film, Eli is engaged in exploring the world's drugs, smoking opium from a Chinese pipe, eating South American mescaline, and buying cocaine from Egyptians. (In one of the film's subtlest nods, he also has a taste for porn that features nonwhite actors.) And all three, in their own way, are interlopers into the world of the Tenenbaums: Etheline married into it, Margot was adopted into it, and Eli seems to be trying to screw his way in.

The Tenenbaum brothers, in the meanwhile, couldn't be less similar. Royal describes himself as half-Jewish, half-Irish, and Chas seems to have gotten all the Jewish (he even names his sons Ari and Uzi) while Richie wound up with all the Irish. Chas has a lonely childhood of crunching numbers, represented, sadly, by the presence of a bunk bed in his childhood room -- it's never clear who the other bunk was meant for, perhaps to share with Richie, perhaps to share with a friend, but it is clear that one bunk went unused. In the meanwhile, Richie was a successful jock who wanted more -- he's always shown reading atlases, chatting on a HAM radio, and painting childish images of Margot, which he carefully hangs around the house.

The film is packed with details, and it could take forever to unravel them, and, as with "Rushmore," it causes the film to deepen with each viewing. I don't know what to say about the fact that Richie attempts suicide, and this is sandwiched between songs by Elliot Smith, who would later kill himself, and Nick Drake, who already had, but it provides the scene with an undeniable melancholy. I likewise don't know what to say about the fact that at the moment of Royal's greatest rejection by his family, over his shoulder is one of Richie's childhood paintings, but it is not of Margot. It is of Richie, as a child, surrounded by tennis awards, with Royal seated behind him. 

In general, these small details contribute to a larger story, and it is one in which the very things that made the Tenenbaum children remarkable are the things that now represent betrayal, and each has retreated into something else, something they also did as children that wasn't tainted by grief. Richie stopped playing tennis -- literally during a tennis match, sitting down and weeping while staring at Margot and her new husband, the neurologist played by Bill Murray. And so he travels, setting out on a tour boat. Margot continued to write plays for a while, many detailing her sexual obsessiveness, but eventually that faded and was replaced by her history of running away, which eventually simply became a practice of sexual infidelity and extreme secrecy. (There is an extremely subtle example of this, in a long flashback sequence, when we discover in a flash that she had slept with a television newsman; we see him interviewing Eli Cash at another point in the film.) And while Chas never stopped being an obsessive businessman, he used it to destroy his father, repeatedly suing him, getting him disbarred, and eventually sending him to prison for a stretch. Chas had a second hobby, exercising, and it is hinted that he is now engaging in this obsessively, and forcing his sons to as well.

The physical details of the film, as splendid and theatrical as they seem, constantly reinforce this story, and it is a remarkably melancholy one, even though it is one in which an old man seeks redemption and his suicidal son helps him find it. It's not just that Margot and Chas both have closets filled with identical clothes (blazers and ties for Chas, striped country club dresses by Lacoste for Margot), it's that Margot's closet also contains costumes from a play she did as a child that was shrugged off by her father in an especially ungenerous move. It's not just that Margot's room has a library full of bookshelves; it's that she has multiple locks on her door, but leaves her windows unlocked for lovers. (And that Richie knows about the window, and is unexpectedly practiced at climbing in.) It's not that Richie gives up his bedroom for his father, who is feigning a fatal illness, but that Richie moves into a tent in the ballroom, and sleeps on the same sleeping bag he had used to run away with Margot when they were children

For fans of Anderson, "Tenenbaums" represents the end of one era of  Anderson's filmmaking and a segue into a new era. This would be the last film he would make with Luke Wilson and the last film he would write with Owen Wilson. This is the first film to feature Anjelica Huston, who would be featured in Anderson's next two films, "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" and "The Darjeeling Limited," which are sort of grouped together as being Anderson's second period films. For a lot of filmgoers, this second period was one of increased whimsy, but lacked the emotional depth of Anderson's early films, especially "Rushmore" and "Tenenbaums."

And there's no doubt that Anderson's films changed after this, and a lot of it was due to the absence of Owen Wilson as a writer. It's hard to know precisely what Wilson was responsible for in any of these scripts, but Anderson's movies would lose the really off-the-wall spaciness of his early pieces, such as Eli Cash's improbable cowboy lifestyle. There's also some marvelously ambiguous lines of dialogue that may or may not have been authored by Wilson, but, with his absence, seem to disappear, such as Dignan declaring that he can't get caught because he's innocent, or Richie, in this film, declaring "I'm going to kill myself tomorrow" and then immediately slashing his wrists. It's not always clear what was lost when Wilson stopped contributing to the scripts, but something is lost, and it's hard not to watch the next two films without feeling that loss.

But for those who think that Anderson's movies somehow became less melancholy or less heartfelt -- well, the next two films have plenty of both.