8
Characters in search of a proper way to express their
emotions
a
Review by Davide Schiano di Coscia
We
have a family composed of very talented and oddly disturbed
people: there is Royal Tenenbaum (Gene
Hachman in one of
his best roles in the past twenty years), A
former sucsessful Lawyer, selfish childish and rejected by his
wife because of his continued unfaithfulness; His
former wife Etheline, played by Anjelica
Houston, then there are theirchildren,
Richie, A former tennis player, portrayed by an implausible
and emotional Luke Wilson, who is in love with
his stepsister Margot, an imperturbable Gwyneth Paltrow, A
former acclaimed author of plays, who is married to a
famous psychiatrist Raileigh Sinclair (an unusual sober Bill
Murray). The last of the Tenenbaum is Chas Tenenbaum (with this
character Ben Stiller gives his best performance
ever), A former financial genius obsessed with the
safety of his family, father of two children, Uzi and Ari. To
complete the picture there are two more characters: Eli Cash
(Owen Wilson), A successfull writer of western
tales and the best friend of Richie and the secret lover of Margot,
Herny Sherman (Danny Glover), who is about to get married
to Etheline. Royal
cannot stand at this marriage and comes up with a plan to
regain his family's love. This
plot will reunite all the Tenenbaums under the same roof and
the consequencies will be really unpredictable. As the reader
can see the most important word in the plot is "former":
almost every character is a former something or someone,
this characteristic is underlined by their clothes because they
wear the same clothes they were wearing when they were children.
At
first glance this can seem a mere curiosity but if you
watch more closely, you will understand this is an important aspect
of the psychology of the characters. All
the characters are Emotionally
frozen: they
can seemimpassible and cold but they are all driven by their
emotions which haven't changed since they
were children. This block is the reason why they are
all former somethings: they are all living live as prisoners
of their past ,they're all prisoners of their past emotions, of
their past obsessions.
In
the hand of another director these ingredients may well become
an unbearable Over sweet mess but Wes
Anderson transforms all
these repressed feelings, all these disturbed characters
into an astonishing
masterpiece,
Anderson does with this movie something unseen before: using a
really accurate and colourful settings,
a superb soundtrackwhich mixes classical
music and music of the 60s and the 70s,
a bunch of the best actors of their generations and an
incredible cutting the director tells the story of these
peopleas if
it's a storybook.
In
conclusion The
Royal Tenenbaums is
an amazing movie from which a new definition of cinema was created. If
you haven't seen it yet, stop everything you're doing and
go to watch it! And i mean you have to
watch it now!
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