Homecoming

Director Wes Anderson's vision in his latest and (so far) greatest film, The Royal Tenenbaums, is so singular that it is difficult to isolate its individual elements. His meticulous specificity in creating characters, the hallmark of his previous two films, Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, has expanded to include not only the dialogue (written again with friend and actor Owen Wilson) but also the costumes, set design, cinematography and music. All of these pieces fit together seamlessly to create  a magical yet tactile New York City of rusted-out cabs, neuroses and a whole lot of heartache.

The city is home to Royal and Etheline Tenenbaum (played masterfully by Gene Hackman and Anjelica Huston) and their three aging child prodigies. Anderson uses a literary motif to frame the story. Each character has authored a book or two, and the film itself employs book covers, captions, title pages, chapter breaks and narration (effectively tackled by a breathy Alec Baldwin) to organize the storytelling. A literary context may  help us grasp the film as well:  Anderson's work is often compared to that of writer J. D. Salinger, and like many of Salinger's characters, Anderson's display a mixture of longing and naïveté that must be fleshed out by the reader's--and viewer's--experience and imagination.

Each of the Tenenbaum children has been endowed with a special talent: Richie (Luke Wilson) was a top-ranked tennis player at age 12, Chas (Ben Stiller) was a gifted  businessman buying real estate when he was in his early teens, and Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), an adopted child (and constantly reminded of that fact by her father), was a prizewinning playwright in the ninth grade.