plug: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
On feeling nostalgic.
Welcome to today’s plug, a quick recommendation of an oft-forgotten film, cult classic, or movie that is dying to be rewatched // We send plugs every Tuesday + Thursday //
When I was fifteen, I played in a dumb punk band with a childhood friend. One day after band practice (wow) in his garage, we went inside his house where his older brother was laying on the couch in the living room watching a weird movie. I looked up at the screen just in time to see a man stabbing another man then helping him into a cab and sewing his wound shut. “What is this?” I asked my friend’s older brother. "The Royal Tenenbaums,” he said as if he were the coolest, most knowing person in the universe because, to me, he was.
Since then, The Royal Tenenbaums has been rattling around inside my skull.
The Royal Tenenbaums is a story of a once brilliant family whose glory has faded after decades of “betrayal, failure, and disaster.” It begins (after an epic prologue) when Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman), a broke litigator, is kicked out of the upscale hotel he lives in and he decides to con his way back into the family he abandoned 20 years earlier — only to find that his family is immensely broken and in need of him.
Wes Anderson’s signature style — the oddball tone, mathematical framing and camera movement, clever dialogue, distinctive fonts, and music-nerd soundtrack — brings a lightness to a story about overcoming trauma, heartbreak, and depression to find joy, compassion, and acceptance within a family.
It also has one of the most beautiful sequences in all of film history, imo, when Margot steps off the Green Line bus to Nico’s “These Days.”
The Royal Tenenbaums will turn 20 next year and I’ve been thinking a lot about it. It’s hard not to watch the film and feel a gently painful longing for New York City before 9/11, the invention of social media and smartphones, and COVID-19 would go on to transform the city in ways that aren’t good or bad (there is no such thing) but fundamentally different. I watched The Royal Tenenbaums with my partner last night and found myself crying. I don’t know why. I wasn’t sad, exactly, but certainly nostalgic and I think I just felt incredibly connected to the Tenenbaums and fifteen-year-old me and New York City. I don’t know. It felt nice. Okay, I’m done now.
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