cult film freak: GENE HACKMAN MAKING AND BREAKING 'THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS'

Gene Hackman in THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS Year: 2001 Rating: ****1/2

It's not so ironic that Gene Hackman was extremely (infamously) difficult to director Wes Anderson working on THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS because his character, the tremendously flawed patriarch of an eccentric New York City family, is the one person who brings the deliberately offbeat movie down to a relatably grounded level...

In Anderson's breakout indie RUSHMORE, Bill Murray did the same thing, sort of... but not so most of the characters couldn't stand him, and spend almost the entire story battling his vices that, in Hackman's case as Royal Tenenbaum, led to the family breaking up early on... opening with child prodigy's setting the stage, creatively coddled by newly single mother Angelica Huston as Etheline...

Gene Hackman and Luke Wilson in THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS

In a mostly equal family-based ensemble, Luke Wilson would be best candidate for central-lead... and he's the only child Hackman really likes, mainly because he likes dad back: as a tennis star who quits during an important match from heartbroken lusting for his sister in Gwyneth Paltrow's Margot, a monotone beauty originally adopted, having an affair with family friend Owen Wilson while married to older man Bill Murry who...

Well to describe every single storyline and the character driving it... including Ben Stiller as a hypochondriac widower raising two boys who wind up bonding with their spontaneous grandfather attempting reconciliation (and Kumar Pallana as Hackman's faithful sidekick)... would take forever, and perhaps another write-up that's not a combined memorial of Gene Hackman will delve further into all the components of this wonderfully complicated tale told in an effectively sparse, even-keeled manner by narrator Alec Baldwin, as if he were reading Leo Tolstoy set in modern times...

Gene Hackman in THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS

Actually, ROYAL is a combination of the J.D. Salinger wealthy family melodrama combined with the vibrantly-hued independent cinema of The Coen Brothers... and it's Anderson's best movie and, despite all the quirkiness, his most conventional...

Again thanks to both Hackman's performance and character, clashing with a troubled family that can hardly think its way out of their own navel-gazing existence, reluctantly having to follow what seems like the wrong path (like faking cancer or street gambling) to eventually wind up inwardly fulfilled, and outwardly complete.