I remember walking out of my first viewing of The Royal Tenenbaums just in awe. That it begins with an (almost) instrumental version of Hey Jude may or may not have anything to do with the fact that I fell in love with it from the start, I’m not sure. But, there’s alot to love here outside of that.
I get that a lot of people don’t understand this film, let alone find it funny. In fact, outside of a small handful of people, everyone I’ve recommended the movie to didn’t like it at all, and, honestly, I have a really hard time explaining why it is I love it so much.
I think it might have to do with the familial aspects of it all, specifically the relationships between the siblings, but more specifically the dysfunction of it all.
I’m not sure I’d classify my family as a large one, but definitely one that’s close knit. More so when we were younger, but even as adults we’ve all stayed close to home and close to each other. I live with my Dad, my Step-Mother (his third wife) and my four year old baby brother. I work with one of my sisters, Kelly. Less than five miles from where I live is my brother, Ryan’s house. We’ve worked at the same job several times together. My other sister, Blake, lives with Kelly and her husband David. Now David has a sister named Jamie…Jamie married Ryan. At one point Jamie, David, Ryan, Kelly and I all worked in the same place. Add in the kids (five nieces: Kayla, Kaylee, Kaysi, Olivia & Jourdan) whom my Mom takes care of on a regular basis…that’s just the immediate family. And we all still see eachother on a pretty regular basis, at least once a week. So, it should probably come as no surprise to anyone that there’s constant drama going on, fights and whatnot, but when things do go bad, and I mean REALLY bad, none of that matters.
I think alot of that has to do with how and why I can relate to The Royal Tenenbaums. When Royal, the patriarch of the clan, sees that he’s finally lost the last little bit of his family he was clinging too he fakes cancer to try and weasel his way back into it. It’s just the latest thing in a long line of horrible things he’s done, not only to his kids, but to his estranged wife. It’s selfish, sure, but love tends to be that way sometimes.
That’s why, in the end you can at least overlook, if not outright forgive him his transgressions. He does it out of love. This particularly comes across as he develops a relationship with his two grandchildren. I think it’s through this that Royal realizes where and how he went wrong as a father and can eventually acknowledge it to his children. So, Royal’s redemption winds up being their salvation.
But, Royal’s story isn’t the most interesting of the bunch. That, I think, belongs to Eli Cash, a close friends of the Tenenbaum kids. He doesn’t have a lot to do for most of the film, but he plays a pivitol role in the final third of the movie.
There’s a lot of made in the early moments of the movie about how smart and advanced the Tenenbaum kids are, but when we meet them as adults none of them are exactly successful. At least, not in everything. Chas is finacially successful, but has failed at almost all other aspects of his life, mostly because of losing his wife. Richie had a semi-successful tennis career, but fell in love with his adopted sister and had a meltdown when she got married. And Margot, well…she got married and managed to hide almost every unique thing about herself from those around her.
That’s what makes Eli’s story so interesting and compelling to me, because he is a success. But, as his story unfolds we see that in his eyes he’s a failure, and he pretty much does what he can to ruin what he’s managed to build. There’s a scene between Royal and Eli where Eli says “I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum.” Royal’s response: “Me too.”
That’s Eli’s story. Nothing he could ever achieve in life would mean as much to him as being part of a family, that family. Probably because he sees that, no matter how bad things get, no matter how much they fail at life, the Tenenbaums always have eachother.
The movie takes a lot of heat from detractors for being over-stylized and too quirky, and maybe it is, but at the heart of it all is a movie about a father doing what’s right, even if it is 25 years too late and a family learning that they can get through anything as long as they stick together.
