Written expressly for Gene Hackman “against his will” per Anderson himself, the wily patriarch of the Tenenbaum family may be, line for line, the funniest character Anderson and co-writer Owen Wilson have ever come up with, perfectly embodied by one of the great 20th-century actors at the outset of the 21st. Royal is the perfect counterpoint to the quiet melancholy of his precocious children turned emotionally paralyzed adults, and an endless source of a very character-specific batch of “expressions” (well-put, Etheline). So how, exactly, did this shady character manage to sire two gifted sons and adopt an equally gifted daughter, despite his absenteeism, self-centeredness and general status as “kind of a son-of-a-bitch” (well-put, Mr. Sherman)? To some degree, Royal and the movie take this for granted, and of course the movie is largely about him earning back the family’s trust. But even at the outset, there’s something oddly accepting about Royal, even at his most scheming, insensitive or self-serving; his bluntless allows him to cut through his children’s preciousness, at least when he’s paying enough attention to them to do so. There’s also a more subtle familial connection: Though on the surface Royal is one of the least fussy or image-centric of Anderson’s creations, he does maintain a self-consciousness about what kind of story he’s in: “Can’t somebody be a shit their whole life and try to repair the damage? I mean, I think people want to hear that,” he entreats at one point. It’s a tremendously cynical framing of the bad-dad redemption story, and also not incorrect. –JH
