The Royal Tenenbaums

I first saw this film when I was about sixteen on one of my frequent trips to the cinema with friends. When one of them told me about it I thought it sounded awful. I was used to seeing action and comedy films on a Friday night and didn’t want to sit through a film about some family and an old man dying. In the end the film completely shocked me and helped to introduce me to the joys of cinema, seeing passed the Friday night popcorn movies to which I was accustomed. It was also the first of many Wes Anderson films that I fell in love with. I often site Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver as being the film which opened my eyes to cinema but thinking about it now, this film did the same thing, albeit to a lesser extent, two years earlier.

Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) is thrown out of his house by his wife (Anjelica Houston) before their three genius children (Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, Gwyneth Paltrow) reach their teens. This has a far reaching impact on all of their lives and none of the three grow up to fully reach their potential. Playwrite Margot (Paltrow) stops writing, Tennis champion Richie (Wilson) retires ages twenty-six after a breakdown and business guru Chas (Stiller) becomes overly protective of his own children following the untimely death of his wife. After years of being out of the picture, Royal decides he wants to become reacquainted with his quirky children but ends up going about it in all the wrong ways.

Another Earth

Rhonda (Brit Marling), a bright and ambitious seventeen year old who has recently been accepted into MIT is driving home one night from a party when she hears an announcement on the radio stating that a planet has been discovered close to our own. The DJ tells his listeners to look up into the sky in search of the pale blue dot. Rhonda is mesmerized by the sight and takes her eyes off the road causing a collision which kills a woman and her son and leaves the father, John (William Mapother) in a coma. Four years later Rhonda is released from prison and gets a cleaning job at a high school. She wants to contact the man whose family she killed and apologise but loses her nerve and instead says she can clean his house. The film charts their relationship as Another Earth draws slowly closer to their own.

The film cost just $200,000 and while being remarkably well made and cast for that amount does look a little rough and cheap. This is not to the film’s detriment though as I don’t think that a shiny or glossy looking film would have worked quite so well. The science behind the story is fairly credible and as someone who is fascinated by astronomy, it had me going along with it. Although problems such as tides and light were ignored by the film makers, I didn’t let them distract me. There will be obvious comparisons to Lars von Trier’s Melancholia but they are mostly misplaced. The film lacks the sense of impending doom and instead views the second Earth as a chance for redemption and opportunity.