After hearing how good this film was, I finally had a chance to watch it. The first thing that struck me was the strong cast − Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, Danny Glover and Bill Murray − all introduced in the opening credits. Not surprisingly, this sets some high expectations for the film, which looking back, I think the film managed to fulfil.
It’s a bizarre, original, dark comedy film, which is what I like most about it. The film is about three child geniuses who, after a successful childhood, have several troubles later on in life: from secret lives to love and even suicide attempts. After watching the film, I found out that Owen Wilson wrote the script − I didn’t know he wrote movies but it shows that he’s not only a good actor but good writer as well.
One of the interesting things I noticed about the script was that it was quite complex and full of details and information that the audience needed to take in to understand the motivations behind the characters’ actions. As a result, the film made heavy use of narration and titles (like “Chapter One, etc”), to drive the story forward and explicitly tell the audience what was happening. I was thinking about this while watching the film and I think that in The Royal Tenenbaums, this approach worked, whereas for many other films, it would ruin the experience and perhaps even bore the audience, who are just being told all this information. I think the main difference is that this film assumed an intelligent audience − you had to put clues and minor details together to understand some of the things the characters would say or do.
So overall, this was a good film − I liked it because of its unconventional approach and underlying dark humour.
4/5
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