Summary
We see a book called The Royal Tenenbaums on a desk. A pair of hands open the book and take a library checkout card out of the envelope inside the book. A title card tells us we are in the “Prologue.” A narrator tells us in voiceover that Royal Tenenbaum is the patriarch of a family in New York, who bought an apartment for his wife and three children, but that then he and his wife separated. The children sit across from Royal and ask him if he’s divorcing their mother; he tells them that it’s not settled, “but it doesn’t look good.” When one of the kids asks why they’re getting divorced, Royal says that he wasn’t as faithful as he could’ve been, but doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. A butler brings him a martini as the narrator tells us that the Tenenbaums were never legally divorced.
The narrator says, “Etheline Tenenbaum kept the house and raised the children, and their education was her highest priority.” We see Etheline sitting with one of the sons on her lap, as the daughter sits nearby reading Chekhov. The more professional looking child, Chas, asks his mother for a check for $187, and Etheline signs it. We then see a book that Etheline has published, called Family of Geniuses, with a picture of the three Tenenbaum children on the cover. We then see the children, Chas, Margot, and Richie, sitting at a table getting their pictures taken and taking questions from a roomful of journalists.
The Tenenbaum children are introduced one by one. First we meet Chas, who lives on the 2nd floor of the house and is a miniature businessman, taking calls at his desk in his room, a room that he has transformed into a “Work Center.” He is a financial wunderkind, having bred “Dalmatian mice” at a young age, which he sold to a pet shop in Little Tokyo. The narrator tells us that he bought real estate in his early teens “and seemed to have an almost preternatural understanding of international finance.” We then see Chas, Richie, and another kid playing with BB guns at Royal Tenenbaum’s summer home. Royal shows up on the roof of the house and shoots his BB gun at Chas, saying “there are no teams!”
We then meet Margo, who lives on the 3rd floor. She was adopted by the Tenenbaums at the age of two, and is a playwright who won a $50,000 grant when she was in 5th grade. The narrator tells us, “She and her brother, Richie, ran away from home one winter and camped out in the African Wing of the Public Archives.” He continues, “Four years later, Margot disappeared alone for 2 weeks and came back with half a finger missing.”
Richie’s room is in the attic, and he is a champion tennis player (since 3rd grade) and amateur painter, painting mostly portraits of Margot. We see Royal taking Richie to a dogfight as a kind of father-son bonding moment, then arriving back home as Margot and Chas watch from above, jealous they weren’t invited along. In an apartment across the street, we see Richie’s best friend, Eli Cash, who lives with his aunt and regularly comes over to the Tenenbaums’ house.
It is the night of Margot’s 11th birthday, and the three Tenenbaum children perform her first play. “What’d you think, dad?” asks Chas, to which Royal responds that he didn’t think the play was believable. Margot looks at her father angrily and excuses herself. Etheline looks at Royal, disappointed, and the narrator tells us that Royal wasn’t invited to any more birthdays after that. The narrator continues: “In fact, virtually all memory of the brilliance of the young Tenenbaums had been erased by two decades of betrayal, failure, and disaster.” We see Richie on a rooftop, taking a small helmet labeled “Mordecai” off the head of a hawk. He sends Mordecai flying away.
A title card reads “Cast of Characters (22 years later).” We are introduced to the actors in the film: Royal, Etheline, Chas, Margot, Eli Cash, Raleigh St. Clair, Henry Sherman, and Richie.
Chapter 1. At the Lindbergh Palace Hotel, the concierge tells Royal that he can no longer keep staying at the hotel and has to vacate his room by the end of the month. Royal is getting a massage, and the narrator tells us that he’s been living at the hotel for 22 years, saying, “He was a prominent litigator until the mid ‘80s when he was disbarred and briefly imprisoned. No one in his family had spoken to him in three years.” We see Richie dictating a letter to Eli on a boat in the middle of the ocean. Richie is retired from tennis, and in his letter he mentions that he thinks he is in love with Margot. The narrator tells us that he has been traveling on an ocean liner for the last two years.
We then see Eli reading for a large audience, as the narrator tells us, “Eli was an assistant professor of English literature at Brooks College. The recent publication of his second novel had earned him a sudden unexpected literary celebrity.” We see Eli holding court with a large group of admirers, then talking on the phone with Margot, who sits in her bathroom painting her nails and smoking a cigarette. Raleigh St. Clair, Margot’s writer/neurologist husband, knocks on the door and asks if he can come in. She unlocks the door with her foot and he peeks in and asks if he can make her dinner. Margot declines, and when Raleigh leaves, she pulls another cigarette out of a box of tissues, as the narrator tells us that she was known for her “extreme secrecy” and that she hadn’t finished a play in 7 years. We see Raleigh working with a student.
Chas sits in a large, sterile looking kitchen, when suddenly an alarm goes off. He runs into the bedrooms of his sons and they go through a fire drill. The narrator tells us that Chas’ wife was killed in a plane crash a year earlier, and this has made Chas exceedingly anxious. Chas and their two sons, Ari and Uzi, were on the flight and survived. We see Chas, Ari, and Uzi outside during the fire drill, and the narrator tells us that Chas had become very concerned about their safety in the wake of the crash.
Etheline is in an office: she is now an archaeologist. She is speaking to an associate, Henry Sherman, a friend and her business manager. Henry encourages Etheline to file for divorce from Royal for tax purposes, before abruptly asking her to marry him and telling her he loves her. “This isn’t really a tax issue, is it?”
Pagoda, the family butler, calls Royal to ask him to meet in private. At the waterfront, Pagoda tells Royal that Henry proposed to Etheline and that Etheline is considering it. Royal becomes immediately competitive, wanting to win Ethel back. The scene shifts and we see Chas and his kids arriving at Ethel’s apartment. Pagoda helps them bring their belongings into the apartment, where Ethel and Henry are hosting bridge classes. Ethel asks him what’s going on and he tells her they got locked out of their apartment. “Did you call a locksmith?” she asks. He tells her he did, but she is still confused about how he managed to pack a bunch of bags if they were locked out of the apartment. “It’s not safe over there,” he says plainly. Ethel excuses herself and goes to talk to Chas in private and he tells her that his apartment just isn’t safe enough.
Chas tucks his two sons into bed in his old room. They want to go back to their old apartment, but he tries to make it seem fun to be in a new place. He rolls out a sleeping bag on the floor and falls asleep in the room with them. We see Royal at the doctor getting his blood pressure checked, preparing for a procedure of some kind.
Ethel goes to visit Margot, who is taking a bath when she arrives. When Ethel tries to confront Margot about the fact that she’s been spending six hours a day watching television in the tub, Margot doesn’t seem to think that anything is wrong. Then Ethel tells Margot that Chas and his sons have come back to live at the apartment. “I think he’s been very depressed,” Ethel says, trying to justify Chas’ move, but Margot is jealous and says, “So am I!” The scene shifts abruptly and we see Margot leaving Raleigh’s house with some bags; she evidently plans to move back to her childhood bedroom as well. “I’m in a rut and I need a change,” Margot says, before going into a phone booth and making a call. She then gets in a cab and tells Raleigh that she still kind of loves him, but she can’t explain it right now. The cab drives off.
At the Tenenbaum residence, Margot goes into her old room, into her closet, where Eli is waiting for her in his underwear.
Analysis
The tone of the film is very quirky and unusual from the start. When we see Royal Tenenbaum, he is dressed in a tweed jacket and wearing sunglasses as he tries to calmly tell his children that he’s divorcing their mother. He is a caricature of a detached New York father, trying to explain what went wrong, but cutting their meeting short to have a martini brought to him by a servant. The children are also very unusual; the girl has a bob haircut and looks sullen, the boy in the middle looks like a miniature professor, and the other boy wears a sweatband and wears a strange expression. Before we know anything else, we know that the Tenenbaums are eccentric.
Alongside the family narrative that is taking place in the film is the staggering precocity and genius of the three Tenenbaum kids. Not only are they living in a dysfunctional, intellectual family in New York, but they themselves are miniature adults, fawned over for their apparent genius, and treated as if they were grown-ups in spite of their being prepubescent. The Tenenbaum childrens' maturity is so accelerated that it acts as a kind of sight gag or punch line in many of the scenes. The sight of a young girl reading Chekhov is funny in itself, as is a young boy taking calls at his desk while sipping a cup of coffee. The plot point that all the Tenenbaum kids are wise beyond their years is pushed into satire, and becomes a humorous image, as much as it is expository.
The Tenenbaums are certainly a dysfunctional family unit, and this is in large part due to Royal’s absent fathering and inconsistent love. He is evasive when the children ask him about his and Etheline’s impending divorce, and at one point we see him shoot Chas in the hand with a BB gun, a juvenile way of playing with his child. Furthermore, he evidently plays favorites, only inviting Richie to go with him on little outings, and diminishing Margot’s play as unbelievable on the night of her birthday. Royal is not an insincere or malicious man, but he clearly has no idea how to be a good father to his precocious children, and is a bit of a child himself.
The plot is thrown into disarray when Henry, Etheline’s friend and business manager, proposes to her. Royal almost immediately receives word that the proposal has taken place and sets about (with the help of his loyal former butler, Pagoda) trying to prevent the marriage from happening. While it is unclear why he wants to prevent it, he is vehement in his desire to intervene. As if by some intuitive signal, Etheline’s children begin returning home; Chas comes because he feels unsafe in his apartment, Margot because she is depressed and jealous of Chas for getting to move home. After almost 20 years apart, the Tenenbaums begin to reassemble, in an apartment that seems not to have changed since the children were little.
The film is a visual feast from the beginning, and exhibits Wes Anderson’s signature stylistic choices, such as symmetrical shots, often perfectly centered in the frame, quick and absurd jumps in place and time, an evocative soundtrack, and a detailed and particular aesthetic. The Tenenbaums’ apartment is filled with obscure corners and unique details. Each child’s room is a strange demonstration of their individual quirks; Margot’s room filled with plays, Chas’ room like more of an office than a bedroom, Richie’s hawk cage on the roof. The Tenenbaums, in all their eccentricities, are the perfect subjects for the eccentrically imaginative Wes Anderson, and the pace, tone, and look of the film itself mirrors the peculiarities of the characters.
