Wes Anderson’s sprawling dramatic comedy ” The Royal Tenenbaums,”Released 20 years ago this month, tells the story of a family of famous child geniuses, the disappointments and neuroses that define their lives as adults and the estranged father whose illness ( simulated) brings them together, under one roof in Upper Manhattan. It is Anderson’s only film to date shot entirely in and around New York City, his only entry into the canon of Gotham cinema, which was so formative for his youth in the Southwest.
“I wanted to live in New York when I was young,” Anderson, originally from Houston, confessed to the New York Daily News in 2012. “So many books, plays and movies that I love have taken place in New York. It really gave me a feel for the city before I even moved here.
But this formulation – “an idea of the city” – is revealing. Anderson did not seek the authenticity and verisimilitude of a native New Yorker (a Spike Lee or a Martin Scorsese, for example); in fact, although “The Royal Tenenbaums” was shot on location, its settings are unrecognizable and the places he checks by name leave Gothamites scratching their heads. Most of the action takes place in Tenenbaum’s ramshackle house on ‘Archer Avenue’, although her daughter Margot has’ a private studio in Mockingbird Heights’ and the Royal Patriarch has spent the last decades at the ‘Lindbergh Palace Hotel. “. A secondary character teaches at “Brooks College”; others take the “Green Line Bus” or the “22nd Avenue Express” train; Mention is made of the “City Public Archives”, the “Maddox Hill Cemetery”, the “Little Tokyo”, the “Kobe General Hospital”, the “Valenzuela Bridge” and, in a real feat of ingenuity that spans the city, “the 375th St. O.”
The best films of 2021
The Times’ top film critics AO Scott and Manohla Dargis have picked their favorite films of the year. Here are some of their choices:
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- “The summer of the soul”: Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Mavis Staples and more star in Questlove’s documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival.
- ‘Spencer’: Kristen Stewart stars as an anguished and rebellious Princess Diana in Pablo Larraín’s response to “The Crown”.
- ‘Who passed’: Set in the 1920s, the film centers on two African-American women, childhood friends, who may present themselves as white.
- ‘Drive my car’: In this calm Japanese masterpiece, a widower travels to Hiroshima to make an experimental version of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”.
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The result is a New York that blurs fact and fiction, a whimsical take on the city, reflecting less the realities of city life than the whimsical notions rooted in Anderson’s sensibility. Many observers have noted the resemblances between the Tenenbaum brood and the Glass family from JD Salinger’s short fiction – much of which originally appeared in The New Yorker, a publication whose twisted, busy, and detailed covers don’t seem like a small influence on Anderson’s idiosyncratic visual style. (His most recent film, “The French Dispatch”, pushes the influence even further, unfolding like an issue of a New York-style magazine.) Other literary influences from the city also abound, including the colorful personalities of AJ darlingprofiles of, the strained family dynamics of John Cheever’s News, and Kay Thompson’s hotel life “Eloïse” books. In a way, “The Royal Tenenbaums” is the reverse of many New York films of the 1930s and 1940s – when on-site photography was so scarce and film production so centralized in Hollywood, that former writers and New York designers have recreated an idealized and fantastical take on Gotham on backlots and clear soundstages across the country.
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Anderson was far from a tourist when he made “The Royal Tenenbaums”: after a turbulent migration from Texas to Los Angeles, he moved to Manhattan in 1999 and found it better suited. (He currently lives in Paris.) Yet he has maintained this apotheosis of the city, born out of those formative years of consuming “Talk of the Town” articles and jokes from alumni of Algonquin. “It’s an alternate universe”, writes historian Mark Asch in his book “New York Movies”, explaining that it is “familiar but out of reach, like all the tattered books written by the Tenenbaums and dusty magazines. which present them on the cover ”.
The vague geographical meaning of the image extends to its historical topicality. There are no notable contemporary references, and the costumes and cars are not from a particular era. The hotel where Royal lives and then works first feels transplanted from the 1940s (with several elevator operators), and the neighborhoods seem closer to the city of the 70s than the 2000s – a bit trashy, decorated in graffiti , prowled by rust. apart from gypsy taxis and thoroughbred mice. “Wes wanted it to be Nowheresville, New York, kind of New York but not New York,” decorator David Wasco told Newsday. He added that even though the film is billed as a Valentine’s Day in New York City, “it wasn’t intentional. We went to the trouble of redesigning the license plates and traffic signs, which are variations of the old yellow traffic signs with the camel hump on it. He’s really specific about wanting these things.
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The Tenenbaum house on Archer Avenue also feels a bit of another world. Anderson spent months looking for the right location. “It had to be a New York home that wasn’t stereotypical and where you had a really strong sense of family history,” he told the New York Observer. Obviously, finding the kind of large, multi-level house he was looking for on Manhattan Island was in great demand, but they eventually found him in Hamilton Heights, specifically at 144th Street and Convent Avenue. Anderson was so in love with the house that he rewrote his script to make it better, although contacting his owner for permission to shoot was initially difficult. The feat was finally accomplished by leaving a note on the door; the owners had been elusive because they had just bought the vacant house and had not yet started their planned and significant renovations. By the time Anderson and his company hired it for six months of preparation and filming – doing most of the structural repairs themselves – the house had paid for itself.
Yet despite Anderson’s best efforts to place his film in a New York City devoid of modern markers, a hint of recognition was unintentional but inevitable. Son Chas (Ben Stiller) is in the middle of a nervous breakdown following the death of his wife in a plane crash; he is in a perpetual state of fear and paranoia, especially about the safety of his sons. “It’s been a tough year, dad,” he tells his father towards the end of the movie, after a particularly and terrifying call.
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