Family Isn't A Word... It's A Sentence.

Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums is the richly tragicomic story of one unique family's sudden, unexpected reunion. Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) and his wife Etheline (Angelica Huston) had three children - Chas (Ben Stiller), Ritchie (Luke Wilson) and Margot (Gwneth Paltrow), and then they separated. Chas started buying real estate in his early teens and seemed to have an almost preternatural understanding of international finance. Margot was a playwright and received a Braverman Grant of fifty thousand dollars in the ninth grade. Ritchie was a junior championship tennis player and won the US Nationals three years in a row.

Virtually all memory of brilliance of the young Tenenbaums was subsequently erased by two decades of betrayal, failure and disaster. Most of this was generally considered to be their father's fault. With a literate script and a wonderful ensemble cast, The Royal Tenenbaums confirms Anderson as one of the most gifted directors on the American scene.