Susan Granger’s review of ‘THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS’ (Touchstone Films)
It’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Highly publicized as a hilarious hoot, this weird, tepid farce about an estranged, fractured family is one of the most thuddingly unfunny comedies of the season. As we’re told by a narrator (Alec Baldwin), the children of Royal (Gene Hackman) and Etheline (Anjelica Huston) were child prodigies. Raised in an imaginary Manhattan by their wealthy mother, their genius deteriorated after they were abandoned by their father. After “two decades of betrayal, failure and disaster,” Chas (Ben Stiller), the older son, a financial whiz, has become a bitter, paranoid widower with two young look-alike/dress-alike sons, while the younger son Richie (Luke Wilson), a former tennis ace, is a traumatized world-traveler who harbors a guilty secret. The adopted daughter Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), a promiscuous playwright, spends her days sulking, locked in a bathroom, smoking, watching TV and soaking in a tub, while Richie’s best friend, Eli Cash (Owen Wilson, who co-wrote the script), is a drug-addled successful novelist. Desperate to re-connect, they all move back into the family mansion, including the sheepish wastrel Royal, who fakes terminal stomach cancer to get attention. Hovering around the periphery are Etheline’s suitor (Danny Glover), Margot’s hapless husband (Bill Murray) and the Indian butler (Kumar Pallana). Despite the presence of a talented acting ensemble and David Wasco’s clever production design, writer/director Wes Anderson, who showed a risky originality with “Bottle Rocket” and “Rushmore,” misfires here. Whatever hostile, deadpan humor exists is so insular, so inaccessible as to be unfathomable. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Royal Tenenbaums” is a bleak, brittle 4. To call it merely peculiar is a gross understatement.
