Wes Anderson’s Family of Failures, Still Funny at 25

Wes Anderson’s third feature opens with a book check-out card, a narrator who sounds like a mid-century documentary, and a family already coming apart. The Royal Tenenbaums is a comedy about failure that plays its saddest scenes straight. It runs 110 minutes. It is very funny, and it is also about a father who lies about having cancer to move back into his estranged family’s house. Both things are true at once, and that tension is the film’s whole engine.

Trailer, via thecoolidge.

Royal Tenenbaum and the Cancer Lie

The plot is simple enough to state plainly. Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) tells his three adolescent children that he and his wife, Etheline (Anjelica Huston), are separating. Each child was a prodigy: Chas (Ben Stiller) a math and business genius whose money Royal steals; Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), adopted, a playwright awarded a grant in the ninth grade; Richie (Luke Wilson) a tennis prodigy and failed artist, Royal’s favorite. Twenty-two years later Royal, a disbarred lawyer and ex-convict, is evicted from his hotel. He learns from the valet Pagoda (Kumar Pallana) that Etheline’s accountant, Henry Sherman (Danny Glover) has proposed to her. Royal’s response is to claim he has stomach cancer.

That lie is the film’s central mechanism, and it is worth being precise about what it buys him. It gets Royal back into the house. It gets his children’s attention. It does not get him forgiveness, and the movie knows the difference. Anderson and co-writer Owen Wilson built a story where the father’s con works and still leaves him exactly where he started — a man his family tolerates rather than loves.

Hackman plays him without a shred of apology. Royal is scrappy, uncaring, and funny in a way that makes you uncomfortable for laughing. The performance is the film’s load-bearing wall.

Chas, Margot and Richie After the Fall

The three children are the movie’s real subject, and each is stuck. Chas has become obsessively overprotective of his sons, Ari and Uzi, after his wife Rachael died in a plane crash. Margot has not finished a play in seven years, is married to the neurologist Raleigh St. Clair (Bill Murray), and is having an affair with Eli Cash (Owen Wilson), the neighbor and Richie’s best friend, now a successful author and a mescaline addict. Richie has been traveling the world on an ocean liner after a breakdown during a tennis match.

Richie comes home. He lets Royal move into his old bedroom and set up medical equipment there. That detail — the son handing over his room to the father who abandoned him — does more work than any speech in the film.

“Family isn’t a word… it’s a sentence.”

The tagline is a pun, and the movie earns it. Every Tenenbaum is serving something.

A Table of Who Wants What

The film’s cast is an ensemble, and the source of most of its comedy is that nobody wants the same thing at the same time. Here is the shape of it.

The table is the movie. Six people, six incompatible wants, one house.

Wes Anderson’s New York, and the Soundtrack

The Royal Tenenbaums was shot in and around New York City, including a house in Harlem used for the Tenenbaum residence. The filmmakers worked to keep the backgrounds from reading as a recognizable New York, mixing fashions and sets from different time periods. That choice matters more than it sounds. The film has no fixed decade, which is why it still looks like nowhere else.

The soundtrack was released in two albums. The score and the needle drops carry the film’s absurdist, ironic humor and its genuine sadness in the same breath. Anderson’s use of music here functions as narration, not ornament.

Alec Baldwin voices the Narrator, and the device is borrowed from literature rather than film. The film is ostensibly based on a nonexistent novel and told with a narrative influenced by J. D. Salinger. Anderson has also cited Louis Malle’s 1963 film The Fire Within and Orson Welles’s 1942 The Magnificent Ambersons as influences. The themes — the dysfunctional family, lost greatness, redemption — come straight out of those sources.

The Cast Anderson Talked Into It

Gene Hackman was Anderson’s choice for Royal. Anderson has said the part “was written for him against his wishes.” Hackman was hesitant, citing his lack of understanding of, or commonalities with, Royal. His agent persuaded him to take the role. While he delayed, Michael Caine was considered, as was Gene Wilder, according to rumor.

In 2025, Anderson described the production friction in detail. He said Hackman was angry about the money and had no interest in doing the film at all, and that Anderson simply kept after him until he agreed. Anderson added that when every other actor accepted the salary, Hackman went along with it, and that this became the film’s way of working. He said Hackman left without saying goodbye, was grumpy, and that the two had friction. Anderson said Hackman did not enjoy the shoot, that he was probably too young for it and that it annoyed Hackman, and that Hackman told him he did not understand the film while they were shooting it. Anderson also said Hackman liked the finished movie.

Bill Murray, who plays Raleigh, added: “Gene was really rough on Wes and I used to kind of step in there and just try to defend my friend.”

Hackman’s decision to star made it easier for Anderson to attract a cast of higher profile. That is the trade the film made, and it is visible on screen: Hackman is the only performer in The Royal Tenenbaums who seems to be acting in a different movie, and the film is better for it. He does not soften Royal. He does not ask you to like him. He plays a man who has spent his life taking what he wants and calling it charm, and he does it without a wink.

What Actually Holds Up

The Royal Tenenbaums is not Anderson’s best film, and it is the one that made the rest possible. The Salinger framing, the nonexistent novel, the book-card structure — these are the moves that became his signature, and here they still feel like discovery rather than habit. The film’s weakness is that it occasionally mistakes its own arrangement for feeling. A few scenes are staged so carefully that the air goes out of them.

What saves it is the cast and the script’s refusal to let anyone off. Margot’s secrecy is not charming. Chas’s overprotection is not cute. Richie’s love for his adopted sister is not romantic. The movie treats all three as damage, and it treats Royal’s cancer lie as the worst thing anyone does in it.

The comparison that matters is between the Tenenbaum children as prodigies and the Tenenbaum children as adults, and the film is honest that the second group is not a redemption of the first. Richie’s breakdown on the tennis court, Margot’s seven blank years, Chas’s dead wife — these are not obstacles to a happy ending. They are the ending, and the movie lets them stand.

The soundtrack’s two albums, the Harlem house, the mixed-period sets, the narrator who tells you what happened before you see it — none of it is decoration. It is all in service of a simple idea: a family is a group of people who failed each other and stayed anyway. Anderson had not yet learned to be sentimental about that. He should have stopped here.

The Royal Tenenbaums is a comedy that does not flinch from the fact that its funniest character is also its most damaging one. Hackman’s Royal is the performance the film is built on, and the film’s refusal to redeem him is what keeps it from curdling. It is not a warm movie. It is a precise one, and precision is harder.

Criterion · ensemble cast · Gene Hackman · movie review · The Royal Tenenbaums · Wes Anderson