THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS

  The Royal Tenenbaums, a beautiful movie which emphasize the happiness and sadness that might happen in a family.
Throughout the film, Anderson employs the use of shapes and framing, color, camera position and movement, lighting, and sound to establish and emphasize the quirky personalities and relationships between the members of the Tenenbaum family.  Anderson also creates a whimsical and story-book quality that enhances the eccentricities of the characters and how the audience views the development of their relationships.

             In the opening scene of The Royal Tenenbaums, Royal sits across a long table from his three children and tells them that he and Etheline, their mother, are separating.  In order to create a sad tone and to establish the relationship between Royal and his children, Anderson uses non-diegetic sound, shapes, and clever framing techniques.  In the film textbook Cinematic Storytelling by Jennifer Van Sijll, non-diegetic sound is described as sound that the characters in the scene wouldn’t logically be able to hear and is added during editing (Van Sijll, 90).  In the opening scene, the instrumentals from the popular Beatle’s hit, “Hey Jude”, are playing in the background.  While everything else in this scene is purposefully flat (to fit in with the overall feel of the film), including the acting and tone of voice of the actors, the somber tone of the song suggests the audience should feel sad for the Tenenbaum children.  The song also suggests the emotions of the children themselves, even though they seem rather indifferent during the exchange with their father.

             The use of sound in the opening scene is similar to how Anderson uses shapes to create other effects in the scene.  For example, the three Tenenbaum children are sitting at their end of the table in a sort of triangular shape.   They are sitting lower than him and this suggests a lack of aggressiveness and creates sympathy for them.  The use of the triangular shape in this frame is significant because it foreshadows the children’s relationship with Royal when they are adults.  

             In contrast to how he employs other techniques in the opening scene, Anderson uses framing to suggest disharmony and other film techniques to highlight certain elements.  At minute 0.31 Royal is shown at the head of a long table surrounded by large chairs and lights in symmetry on the wall behind him.  Additionally, the children are sitting all the way on the other side of the table, far away from Royal, so they don’t interrupt the symmetry of the shot.  This makes the shots of Royal completely balanced, which works against the content of the scene.  He is telling his children that their family is being split apart, and yet the frame suggests harmony and symmetry.  This is significant because it enhances the feeling of separation and disharmony for the audience.

             In addition to exploiting sound and bordering elements, Anderson reveals certain characteristics of the Tenenbaum family through specific camera movements such as the tracking shot, push-in shot, and the tilt-down shot.  In the succession of scenes following the opening, the audience sees Chas, Margot, and Richie Tenenbaum’s lives as children in the Tenenbaum household without their father.  One of the camera movement techniques Anderson uses here is the tracking shot.  The first thing the audience sees is an eccentric array of framed drawings and photographs in various frames on the wall above the staircase.              

After the audience sees the Tenenbaum children and their mother together, the film starts presenting them one by one in their childhood bedrooms.  Anderson continues to enlighten the audience to specific characteristics of the children so the audience can better understand them as adults later in the film.  After the tracking shot, Anderson chooses a push-in shot to build on certain aspects of Chas’ personality.  Also, Anderson inspires sympathy for Margot through the pull-out shot just as the push-in shot did during the previous scene.

             In order to also create sympathy for the other child, Richie Tenenbaum, and to reveal his unique childhood experiences and personality, Anderson uses the tilt-down camera movement.  This first frame of the trophies familiarizes the audience to Richie’s genius as a child sports legend.   Because of the obvious effort he is putting into his work, this tilt-down shot shows the audience that his success is seen as sort of lack of childhood like the other two Tenenbaum children experience.

             This effect is repeated throughout the scenes of the Tenenbaums as children.  The audience hardly ever sees any of the Tenenbaum children simply playing like children normally would.  They have careers, responsibilities, and complicated relationships all while they are in middle school.  

            Throughout the next few scenes the audience is introduced to Royal and his butler Pagoda now getting kicked out of the hotel they’ve lived in for the past twenty years, Etheline with her accountant and fiancé Henry Sherman in her house, Margot alone in her bathroom in the apartment she shares with her husband Raleigh St. Clair, Richie out at sea after traveling the world, and Chas practicing a fire drill with his two children Ari and Uzi. 

We can tell they’re used to this because they don’t seem to be taking it seriously and they seem even a little exasperated by the effort.  Anderson’s use of the hand-held camera is significant because it suggests the instability and craziness of the actions happening on screen but also of Chas’ life as a whole.  The scene then smash cuts to a static shot of a photo of Chas’ wife who we find out has recently died.  The smash cut underscores the difference between his erratic behavior during the fire drill and his quietness and stillness while he flips through pictures of her.  Anderson uses this technique to emphasize the instability of Chas’ life now compared to the stable life he had when his wife was still living.

    Anderson reveals also reveals aspects of Margot’s relationship with her husband Raleigh St Clair through a two-shot.   Raleigh and Margot each takes up the same amount of space in the frame and are even wearing clothes with similar shape and color.  While Anderson used imbalance to emphasize the disharmony between Etheline and Royal, he uses balance in this shot to highlight the same aspect in Margot and Raleigh’s relationship.  Margot is telling Raleigh that she is leaving him for good, and the symmetry and balance in this scene almost seem like a mockery of what’s happening.  Anderson often highlights the awkwardness between in a scene as he does here with a two-shot.  This makes the audience feel more uncomfortable and emphasizes the purposeful awkwardness in the scenw.

Wes Anderson used many different film elements and techniques in The Royal Tenenbaums to reveal different things about the characters and their relationships and to give the film an overall whimsical quality.  Anderson created sympathy for the characters, showed disharmony or connection between different characters, emphasized emotions in the scenes, showed the overall quirkiness of the Tenenbaum family, and gave the film a storybook-like quality through the use of camera pans, tilts, push-ins and pull-outs, specific musical choices, different cameras, the use of framing and shapes, and different types techniques such as the two-shot discussed earlier.  The Royal Tenenbaums is an eccentric, hilarious film that through Wes Anderson’s clever direction gets across the subtleties of the odd kinship of the Tenenbaum family.

   

HARACTERS OF THE MOVIE:

·         Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) – A brazenly insensitive lawyer and a failure as a father. He deliberately blasts his son Chas with a BB gun, and without fail and inconsequentially feels he must point out that Margot is his "adopted daughter." He frequently took only Richie to dogfights while excluding Chas and Margot. Anderson had Hackman in mind for Royal but the actor was unwilling to take the part, saying he prefers to disappear into a role, instead of having a role fitted for him. 

·         Etheline Tenenbaum (Anjelica Huston) – the mother of the Tenenbaum children, who "makes their education her top priority." A renowned archaeologist and author, and later on, Ethel find love with Henry Sherman, her accountant, the complete opposite of her alienated husband Royal.

·         Chas Tenenbaum (Ben Stiller) – A genius in international finance, Chas sued his father two times and had he disbarred because of the bonds his father stole from his safe deposit box when he was fourteen. His wife, Rachael Evans Tenenbaum, died in a plane crash and he has since become obsessed with the safety of his sons, Ari and Uzi (Grant Rosenmeyer and Jonah Meyerson). They have a beagle named Buckley.

o    Aram Aslanian-Persico as young Chas

·         Margot Tenenbaum (Gwyneth Paltrow) – A playwright and adopted daughter, Margot once ran away from home for two weeks to meet her birth family and came back with half of one of her fingers missing. She is shown moping in her bathtub, watching television, ignoring her husband. She smokes, unbeknownst to anyone else in her family as she is infamously secretive.

o    Irene Gorovaia as young Margot

·         Richie Tenenbaum (Luke Wilson) – A tennis prodigy, Richie is secretly in love with Margot. He ends his successful tennis career with a nervous breakdown on court in front of thousands of fans (the film implies the cause was the marriage of Margot and Raleigh the day before). As the film opens, he has been living on an ocean liner for several months. He drinks Bloody Marys with pepper throughout the movie, so much so that he carries a capped pepper shaker in his jacket pocket. The character is loosely based on former champion Björn Borg, who shocked the tennis world by retiring at age 26, and wore the same style headband and trademark Fila polo.

o    Amedeo Turturro as young Richie

·         Eli Cash (Owen Wilson) – A "friend of the family" since the children were very young, considered Richie's best friend, Eli has "always wanted to be a Tenenbaum." He gained success as an author of Westernnovels; his latest work presupposes the outcome if George Armstrong Custer had not died at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Eli has been having an affair with Margot and has a drug problem. Anderson has stated that Eli is based on the authors Cormac McCarthy and Jay McInerney.

o    James Fitzgerald as young Eli

·         Henry Sherman (Danny Glover) – Ethel's accountant and romantic interest. He confronts Royal on his supposed stomach cancer with the family present, revealing that his wife had stomach cancer, and Royal does not show any of the symptoms.

·         Raleigh St. Clair (Bill Murray) – Husband of Margot and a famous neurologist. Anderson has mentioned that St. Clair was based on Oliver Sacks. He is constantly accompanied by his adolescent test subject Dudley Heinsbergen (Stephen Lea Sheppard).

·         Pagoda (Kumar Pallana) – Friend and servant to the family. He also acts as an informant for Royal to update him on his family. They met after Pagoda, an assassin in Kolkata, stabbed Royal. However, he subsequently earned his trust by carrying Royal on his back to the hospital.

·         Dusty (Seymour Cassel) - Elevator worker at the Lindbergh Palace Hotel. A trusted friend of Royal, he helps deceive the Tenenbaum family about Royal's illness by pretending to be Dr. McClure. Later, he helps Royal get a job at the hotel.

·         Andrew Wilson as Father Farmer / Tex Hayward

·         The narrator of the story is Alec Baldwin.

Back to The Royal Tenenbaums, I think all the characters in the film are rather important but for the sake of this analysis, I’d like to focus only on Royal and Chas.  Let’s take a look at their flaws first:

Royal: precisely, he should be considered the antagonist of this film.  He dumps his wonderful wife (who he admits to not being faithful with) and his three brilliant children.  Only when he runs out of money and learns that his wife is involved with another man does he attempt to reestablish contact with them (by lying about having cancer). 

Chas:  Chas is an obsessive compulsive and paranoid man.  When his father comes back into his life under the premise of having cancer, he is the only one who greets him with distain and anger.  Moreover, Chas is completely overprotective of his children to the point where if he doesn’t change, they will grow up to be just like him.

 

If I were to just give you these two summaries of Royal and Chas, you would probably think they are terrible people.  However, the film humanizes both characters by providing the viewer with some context to understand them:

Royal:  As Royal lives in his house with his family, he realizes the damage that he’s caused to both his family and friends.  The longer he stays there, the more determined he becomes to fix everything.  That’s why when Ethlene finds out that he’s lying about his cancer and kicks him out, we feel bad for him because we know that his intentions are now sincere.

Chas:  Chas has a very estranged relationship with his father.  Chas will never forget the feeling of betrayal the day his dad shot him with a BB gun.  Moreover, Chas’s distain for his father grows as he and his sister, Margot, are always excluded from the activities in which Royal only takes Richie.