Etheline\'s Clan: The Royal Tennebaums

Etheline's Clan: The Royal Tennebaums

The humor of films about children is often derived from the children's adult behavior, in comparison to their childish parent's immaturity. But what about films about child prodigies? In the case of director Wes Anderson's 2001 film the Royal Tenebaums, the viewer is encouraged to laugh at the spectacle of a group of child prodigies who behave like children, rather than resemble grown adults. The Royal Tenenbaums illustrates the paradox of child prodigies: treated as half-adults, half-children, prodigies tend to remain half-adults, half-children well into middle age, bickering like schoolboys and schoolgirls. Given all of the advantages in the world, the children seem determined to ruin the happiness fate has conspired to bring them. Precisely because the wealthy, upper middle-class New York Tenenbaums take themselves so seriously, Anderson suggests, we should not.

For example, Richie Tenenbaum, a gifted tennis player and artist as a child, falls in love with his adopted sister Margot, although this is an alliance that can clearly bring him nothing but pain. Margot seems to continue smoking, a habit she has had since her childhood as a teenage playwright, just to challenge her family in an adolescent manner. Mathematician Chas may have once been the most functional of all of the children, but since his wife's death has become hysterically overprotective of his own brood.

The source of the children's brilliance and dysfunction is rooted in the character of their parents. Anderson opens the film with a montage of the young Tenenbaum's successes -- and the sight of their father Royal telling their mother Etheline that he wants a separation. Etheline Tenenbaum remains in the huge, sprawling Victorian-style family residence, where she continues to work as a brilliant paleontologist. However, for all of her brilliance she cannot stop her husband, now living in an apartment, from using the children against one another, like the favoritism he shows to Margot. Royal, a man who is even more childish than his children pretends to have stomach cancer so his wife will allow him back to the family home after the children are grown and he has been thrown out of his is apartment. But the children gravitate back to Etheline's side as well. It is clear that despite their advanced age, they have remained emotionally stunted, as if all the Tenenbaum children are still trapped in the ages when they had their first successes. None of them have ever quite fulfilled the promise they showed as young people. Excellence comes naturally to them, but the basic acts of living and family life seem very difficult.

Like all of the Tenenbaums, Etheline believes the rules of normal polite society do not apply to her and she seems slightly out of touch with reality. Etheline is confident she has raised a brood of geniuses. Ironically, she seems well-adjusted to her eccentric life, although her children are not. The children seem angst-filled and unable to appreciate the smallness of their worries in comparison to those of the rest of the world. Yet although all of her children struggle romantically, Etheline seems supremely secure and is even being courted by younger, handsome financial adviser, Henry Sherman. This spawns a great deal of bickering and shock amongst the adult children, although Etheline is blithely unconcerned.