The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Wes Anderson · a film · 2001 · the theatrical cut, about 110 minutes · written with Owen Wilson · narrated by Alec Baldwin
Mode
Family comedy-drama told as a book; chronicle, farce and elegy in one
Mythos
The prodigal father returning to the house he was sent from; a fallen house of genius told as legend; a deposed king in his own castle
Phase
A family’s late reunion in one house, after a prologue of the children’s early fame and before an epilogue in a cemetery
Presentation
Feature film in colour, the theatrical cut of about 110 minutes, in English; a narrator throughout, a library-book frame and numbered chapters announced by title cards; seven family members across three generations and four principal outsiders
Register
Deadpan and tableau under one even narrating voice, broken twice: an arrival from a bus in slow motion and a razor in a bathroom
Scale
Three generations, one house, an invented New York
Governing Proposition
A father who left a family of child prodigies comes back to their house on a lie, and earns a place in it only once he has stopped asking for one. The wager of the film is that early brilliance is a wound as much as a gift, that the damage done by a father’s contempt outlasts the talents it was done to, and that a family can be told as a book, composed, frontal and at a distance, without the distance sparing anyone their grief.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins as a book. A library copy is presented, and a narrator, in Alec Baldwin’s even voice, tells the family’s history before any scene is played. Royal and Etheline Tenenbaum have three children, and the prologue presents them one by one as prodigies: Chas in finance, Margot as a playwright, Richie at tennis. Margot is adopted, and her father says so whenever he introduces her. The parents separate, and Royal is put out of the house. The prologue ends with his departure, and everything after it is measured against what the children were before he went.
Then the book is opened. Each chapter is announced by a title card that shows its first page, and the story takes place almost wholly in one house, on Archer Avenue, in a New York the film does not name. The children are adults now, and they have not changed their clothes. Richie wears the headband and tennis shirt, Margot the fur coat and the barrette, and Chas and his two sons, Ari and Uzi, wear red tracksuits. The costume is a sentence the film never has to speak: these are people who stopped at the moment of their early fame.
Wes Anderson directed the film from a screenplay he wrote with Owen Wilson, and it was released in the United States in December 2001, in one cut of about 110 minutes. Robert Yeoman photographed it, Dylan Tichenor edited it, David Wasco designed it and Mark Mothersbaugh wrote the score. Gene Hackman plays Royal, Anjelica Huston Etheline, Ben Stiller Chas, Gwyneth Paltrow Margot and Luke Wilson Richie, with Owen Wilson as Eli Cash, Danny Glover as Henry Sherman, Bill Murray as Raleigh St. Clair and Kumar Pallana as Pagoda. The screenplay was nominated for the Academy Award, and Hackman won a Golden Globe for the role.
Movement II
Royal is broke and evicted from the Lindbergh Palace Hotel, and Henry Sherman is courting Etheline. Royal answers with a lie: he says he has cancer and is dying, and on that claim he moves back into the house he was sent from, with Pagoda, the servant who once stabbed him and then saved him. The deposed king sleeps again in his own castle, in a room he has taken back.
The house fills. Chas, whose wife has died, runs fire drills for his sons in their tracksuits; his control is grief, and the film knows it. Margot keeps her secrets, the habit of a child introduced as adopted. Royal baits Henry with taunts about his race, and the film lets them stand as what they are. His contempt for his children, the damage that outlived their talents, is not undone by his return. It is only brought back into the house.
What Royal does with the grandsons is the first thing he does well. He takes Ari and Uzi out on the town, shoplifting, racing go-karts, at the dog track. The film is exact about what this is: not reform, but use. When the lie of the cancer is exposed, the place he took by it is lost, and whatever place he earns afterwards is earned by other means.
Movement III
Richie waits for Margot where the bus stops. She steps down from it in slow motion, in her fur coat, to Nico’s “These Days”. It is the one moment in which the film lets its distance go. Nothing is said, and nothing needs to be: he loves her, and the film has shown it in the time a door takes to open.
Around the family stand the outsiders. Raleigh St. Clair, a neurologist, keeps a laboratory and a case study of a boy named Dudley, one of the film’s ornaments. Eli Cash writes fiction and is an addict. Every grown child in the house has a vocation that failed or stalled, and each vocation is the child’s gift, held too long.
The narrator never raises his voice over any of it. The house is shown room by room, child by child, in frontal tableaux that set each figure in a fixed position, as in an illustration. The manner is comic and cool, and it is also the knowledge: the composition holds these people where their childhood left them, and the film looks at them from outside, as a book about them, which is what fame made of them.
Movement IV
Richie goes into a bathroom and shaves, to Elliott Smith’s “Needle in the Hay”. Then he turns the razor on himself. The editing is hard and quick, and there is blood in the basin. It is the most serious thing in the film and its dreadful summit, a sudden drop through the comic surface, and the narrator’s level voice is the same voice that told the go-karts.
He survives. Afterwards he and Margot sit together in the tent, a record playing. The film holds the scene with tenderness and blesses the love of an adopted sister and brother without explaining it. It is felt more than understood, and the film seems content that it should be.
Royal’s repair is made of acts. He gives Etheline her divorce, and she is free to marry Henry. He does not confess his way back; he becomes useful. The film’s disclosure is in that distinction: the damage done by a father cannot be talked away, and what repair there is comes small and late and practical.
Movement V
Eli, high, drives his car into the front of the house, and the dog, Buckley, is killed. Chas chases Eli through the house, the farce at its broadest, and the film stages it in the same composed manner as the bathroom. Royal buys a Dalmatian from a fireman on the spot.
Then Chas and his father speak. Chas tells him: “a rough year, Dad”. It is the payment for the fire drills and the tracksuits, the grief that the film has shown as control, said at last in four words to the man who caused part of it. Royal does not make a speech in reply. He has bought a dog.
The epilogue is in a cemetery. Royal has died, and his death is set down on an epitaph. The ending is prepared by Buckley’s death and the dog bought from the fireman, and it comes quickly, as a grace note. The book closes on a family that has not been cured, only gathered.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds the spine load-bearing. The prologue’s catalogue of prodigies is required: every adult failure in the present is measured against a success the film has already shown, Chas’s finance, Margot’s play, Richie’s tennis. Royal’s false cancer is the engine that returns him to the house, and its exposure is what makes him earn a place by other means. Chas’s grief for his wife, played as a fire drill and a tracksuit, pays out in his last exchange with his father, and the cemetery is prepared by Buckley’s death and the dog bought from the fireman. What gives: Raleigh’s study of Dudley, the Dalmatian mice, part of Eli’s line and Pagoda’s past are ornament the design permits rather than requires.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. Early brilliance is a wound as much as a gift; the damage done by a father’s contempt and absence outlasts the talents it was done to; repair comes in small, late, practical acts, not in confession. Royal is not reformed. He becomes useful: he takes the grandsons out, gives Etheline her divorce, pays for the dog. The film knows that Chas’s control is grief, and that Margot’s secrecy is the habit of a child introduced as adopted. Much is disclosed through image: the children still wear their childhood costumes as adults, and the costume is the meaning. What holds it below the top: the irony that protects the characters also protects the viewer, and part of the truth arrives as mood.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The elevation is rationed, and it comes at a few exact points. Margot stepping off the bus in slow motion to Nico’s “These Days” is a summit of a quiet kind, the one moment the film lets its distance go. Richie in the bathroom, to Elliott Smith’s “Needle in the Hay”, is the dreadful summit: the shave, the cut, hard edits, blood in the basin, a sudden drop through the comic surface. Richie and Margot in the tent, a record playing, hold a tenderness, and the funeral closes on a grace note. Between them the register is level by design, deadpan and tableau under an even voice, and much of what the film reaches is poignancy rather than transport.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The patterns are present, and the plot is built on them. The prodigal is the father, not the son: Royal returns to the house he was sent from, by a lie, and is received only once he has stopped asking to be. The family is a fallen house, a line of genius gone to ruin, told by a narrator from a library book as legend. Royal is a deposed king in his own castle, sleeping in a room he has taken back, with Pagoda as the servant who once stabbed him and then saved him. The love of an adopted sister and brother is a romance motif. What holds it short of the gate: the myth is evoked through the book and the names more than built into a world that bears its weight.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is the American family comedy-drama and the literary family chronicle, Salinger’s Glass family the source most often named. The turn: a live-action ensemble film made as a book, with title cards that show each chapter’s opening page, an omniscient narrator, a fixed palette and wardrobe for each character, and frontal, flat tableaux that refuse the naturalism of the family drama while carrying its grief. The stake was real: a studio picture with Hackman, Huston, Paltrow, Stiller, Murray and Glover, played in a register that could have read as mannered and cold. Held a tenth below the bar by precedent: the manner was largely Anderson’s already in Rushmore (1998), here enlarged rather than invented, in a comedy of eccentrics audiences knew how to receive.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The tableaux, centred and frontal, set the family in fixed positions like figures in an illustration, and the fixity is the knowledge: these are people who stopped at the moment of their early fame. The unchanged costumes, Richie’s headband and tennis shirt, Margot’s fur coat and barrette, Chas and his sons in red tracksuits, state arrested lives without a line of dialogue. The book and the narrator place the story outside the family, as something told about them, which is what fame did to them. The distance lets grief show without being milked, and when it breaks, on the bus and in the bathroom, the break means something. The cost: some decor is style for its own sake.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Twenty-five years of return, with sustained attention to show for it: continuous critical writing, a central place in the large literature on its director, and a following that has kept watching. The questions stay open. Is Royal redeemed, or does he only become bearable? What does the film think of his lie? What is Margot and Richie’s love, and why does the film bless it? Whose book is the narrator reading, and does the telling mock the family or love it? On return the design rewards the eye: the rhyme of costumes, the repeated tracking past the rooms, the songs placed as commentary. What holds it: much of the return is to texture and the pleasure of the manner, and the argument about the film is often an argument about its director’s style.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 2000s, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: the film fixed a complete style, the composed frontal tableau, the chaptered book, the chosen pop soundtrack, the ensemble of depressed prodigies, and showed that such a style could carry a large studio cast and real grief at once; less a reorganisation of what film could do than the maturing of a manner into a mode. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide and demonstrable. The film is named as the template of the American comedy of melancholy eccentrics that followed, its look passed into advertising, fashion and design, and the style it first stated in full remains a recognised term in criticism and popular culture. The limit: much of what was taken was decor and tone.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and surface. The film as released survives whole: one cut, and no altered version. Its presence across twenty-five years is continuous and wide for a film of its kind, in revival screenings, steady circulation on home video and streaming, a place on many lists of the decade’s films, and renewed attention as its director’s later films reached larger audiences. Wide presence earns at most a tenth, and fame is not proof of permanence. The surface ages little: the style is fixed to its maker more than to its year, and the costumes and songs belong to an invented past rather than to 2001. Twenty-five years is a short demonstration of survival, and the bar is met, not cleared.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The making carries the form in several departments. Robert Yeoman’s photography holds the tableau with control, and the whip pans and overhead inserts are used with discipline. David Wasco’s design of the house, room by room and child by child, is part of the story, and the costume plan is exact. Mark Mothersbaugh’s score, pizzicato and choral, and the placing of the songs are among the most precise of the period. Dylan Tichenor’s cutting gives the narrated montages a brisk rhythm and lets the bus arrival hold. Gene Hackman plays Royal’s charm and cruelty in one breath. The costs: several performances are held to one note by the manner, the farce of Eli’s car is staged more loosely than the tableaux, and decoration sometimes stands in for scene construction.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Eli, high, driving his car into the front of the house and killing the dog, broad farce; and Richie in the bathroom with a razor, the most serious thing in the film. One law governs both: everything is presented, composed and slightly distanced, as a page in a book, and the distance neither mocks the despair nor softens the farce. The narrator’s level voice covers the suicide attempt and the go-kart ride alike. The range is wide, slapstick, a love story, grief, a con and a death, and the law holds across all of it. The strain: in a few places the law governs by decor rather than understanding, in Raleigh’s research and the mice, and the closing grace, Royal’s death set down on an epitaph, arrives quickly.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 110 minutes holds. The family across three generations, with marriage, divorce, remarriage, adoption, widowhood and grandchildren; consciousness, at a deliberate distance but present in several characters; vocation and its failure, in finance, playwriting, sport, fiction and neurology; money and class, Royal broke and evicted from his hotel, the house as a family estate; race, lightly and pointedly, in Royal’s taunts of Henry Sherman; addiction in Eli; death and burial. One house and one story of a father’s return hold them together. What keeps the axis lowest: the state, history and the natural order do not enter, the city is an invented New York without a public world, the sacred is absent but for the funeral, and the outsiders’ worlds are sketched rather than held.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Inner Law at 8.7, then The Living Form at 8.6, then Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 8.5. One law, everything told as a page in a book at a fixed distance, governing a car through the front of a house and a razor in a bathroom; a form whose tableaux and unchanged costumes are the knowledge that these people stopped at their early fame; a complete style first stated in full and taken up widely after it; and a film that survives whole in one cut, its surface fixed to its maker rather than its year.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: the family across three generations, vocation, money, race, addiction and death held in one house, with the state, history and the natural order absent and the city without a public world. Above it, The Sublime at 7.8, an elevation rationed to the bus, the bathroom, the tent and the funeral, much of it poignancy rather than transport, and The Archetypal Deep at 8.0, a prodigal father and a deposed king evoked through the book and the names more than built into a world that bears them.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.2, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable meet the bar of 8.5 exactly, but The Swerve at 8.4 falls a tenth short, The Unconcealment at 8.2 three tenths short and The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 five tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.3 from a sum of 99.0, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Royal Tenenbaums as released in the United States in December 2001, the theatrical cut of about 110 minutes, in English, in its one version, from the library book of the frame to the cemetery: directed by Wes Anderson from a screenplay by Anderson and Owen Wilson, photographed by Robert Yeoman, edited by Dylan Tichenor, designed by David Wasco, with music by Mark Mothersbaugh and narration by Alec Baldwin. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, one line of four words, and speech is otherwise described; songs are named by title only where the cue is certain. Details that could not be verified, among them the date of the film’s first festival screening, the number of chapters, the aspect ratio, the treatment of the cut in later home editions, the full list of songs, the budget, the box-office returns, the scene and shot counts and the share of the dialogue, are not given.