The Royal Tenenbaums: immediately after writing this, Max realized it was true.

It's pretty classy that Gene Hackman didn't become a "Wes Anderson player" after this, what with his doing an amazing job. In a few years, Wes may digitally ad a ghostly image of Hackman into Darjeeling.

And meanwhile, Bill Murray is so low-key he's almost unrecognizable (Herman Bloom feels like Buster Keaton). Everything with Dudley is genius silent-comic timing, and Murray's silent pain for Margo simmers regally behind the scruff-beard. And of course Steve Zissou was a replicant.

This entire world is a royal family and their kingdom. Suitors try to marry into their family, and townspeople fantasize about being blood-related, even through it's deep disfunctions and continual strife. The king, of course, returns, and hilarity ensues. And one really can't say enough about Wes Anderson's subtle (and really not-at-all-subtle) humor. That it can be funny the way a person reacts to something that isn't funny at all, like say suicide, or that it's both hilarious and tragic that each character is so shut-off from one-another is a difficult thing to deal with. It's hard to realize that the audience is supposed to be horrified one moment and laughing the next, without ever letting go of the horror. It isn't just a comedy, and so the humor is much weightier. I laugh much harder.

I remember when I saw this in the theatre, and having seen (and fallen in love with) Rushmore, I was a pretty tough judge. I felt like with Rushmore, Anderson had set out to make a film that appealed to him, and his sense of teetering subtlety. Maybe there would be a group of people out there who got it, but oh well if not. And it seemed to me, then, that with his next film he had learned that there was indeed a market for his strange little universes, and so he turned up the volume. The subtlety is less, the abruptness is more, the control of his world is firmer, and I was felt like the guy who liked this band before they hit it big. I felt like he had already become a caricature of himself. But looking at Tenenbaums now, having seen it probably 20 times, I am more apt to see it as a film, all by itself, and not analyze it in the Great Anderson Continuum. As difficult as that can be.

Now I just love the beauty of the sequences, and boldness of the art design, the precious chemistry between those wonderful Wilson Brothers, the grace of each actor living in their own, selfish universe, and the genius of a story that can equip all those actors with so many pieces of each of their characters, and have them all hate each other because they are family, and love each other because they are family. Anderson is very emotionally manipulative, and can float a little on the "style before substance" side of things, but he is so in the best way, and the film is so lovely because of it.

But the last shot--Wes Anderson's trademark, slow-motion curtain call--is inferior to Rushmore's. So there.