The Royal Tenenbaums

A novel, a game, but is it a film?

Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums presents all the perplexities you associate with an over-ambitious screen adaptation of a novel. There are too many characters to properly get to know in two hours, too many digressions, too many narrative threads left hanging, too arch an insistence on retaining the book's authorial voice, here incarnated by Alec Baldwin's wryly detached talk-over. You emerge, head spinning, determined to go back to the book and take it in at your own pace. But there's a catch: although the film begins with a copy of The Royal Tenenbaums stamped out of a lending library, there's no such novel. Anderson's film is a dizzy gag about cinema's spurious aspirations to literariness. As celluloid novels go, this is as flamboyant as they come; if the book existed, it would be Oprah's pick of the month, outsell The Corrections and get one of those interminable glowing reviews from John Updike in The New Yorker.

The literary genre is that quintessential American one, the dysfunctional family saga. Grand as the Tenenbaums are, Royal is actually the first name of their patriarch – a dapper, disreputable lounge-lizard attorney, played by Gene Hackman in cantankerously mischievous form. His wife is archaeologist and author Etheline – Anjelica Huston at her most regally ostrich-like. And their children are a clutch of troubled geniuses – tennis champ Richie (played as an adult by Luke Wilson), proto-yuppie speculator Chas (Ben Stiller) and adopted Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), a chain-smoking playwright with mournful panda eyes and a prosthetic wooden finger.

The Tenenbaum history proper is crammed into the elegantly breathless exposition of the first few minutes; the rest is all aftermath and comedown. Royal and Etheline have separated, his free-wheeling career has plummeted, and the little geniuses have burned out, grown up and settled into traumatised ruts. As the family reunites in their crumbling New York brownstone, what narrative that follows is fragmented to say the least, a hiccuping succession of set-ups and subplots: Royal's outrageous attempt to scam his family with a phoney cancer story; Etheline's romance with her stately financial adviser Henry Sherman (Danny Glover); the crack-up of an honorary Tenenbaum child, drug-addled novelist Eli Cash (Owen Wilson, who co-wrote the script with Anderson); and Margot's chilly marriage to a star neurologist (a shaggy, corduroyed Bill Murray).

All of this resembles less a Hollywood narrative than an elaborate, whimsical board-game imitation of a movie, with cut-out cardboard pieces. With the exception of Hackman's wild-card paterfamilias, the starry cast are called on for much of the time to do the opposite of conventional screen acting. They effectively become impassive cartoons, with their uniform-like costumes and stylised facial features – Margot always panda-eyed in Sixties chic, Chas and his two sons in matching red tracksuits, the saturnine Richie in tennis gear under his sober beige suit. The bizarre visual stylisation makes watching the film feel like a leisurely flip through a sumptuously mounted book of illustrations, or an eccentric early 1960s design catalogue. Together with designer David Wasco and photographer Robert Yeoman, Anderson creates a purely hermetic world – an imaginary, ramshackle Manhattan, brown-tinged and archaic, adrift between the 1950s and the present. The film is so crammed with detail and oddball ornamentation that, more than most, it feels expressly designed for multiple viewings. It will set up a densely populated cocktail party scene purely for a single throwaway line, or create a coffee-lounge set for a scene lasting a matter of seconds: there's something of the profligacy of Seventies Woody Allen.

The film has its share of acidic one-liners, but mostly its humour is a matter of spacey distractedness that make you chuckle in the same way as, say, Jacques Tati. Margot goes to meet Richie, back from a cruise; as she steps off the bus in sultry slow-motion, the soundtrack plays a luxuriously morose Nico number, and Anderson cuts to a bedazzled Richie, seated in front of his baggage, as a chorus line of white-suited sailors steps out behind him. At the hands of most other film-makers, this would be camp or kitsch – Anderson gives it a luminous poise. The soundtrack is fabulously eccentric too, mixing a score by ex-Devo mainstay Mark Mothersbaugh with a repertoire of Sixties and Seventies pop melancholy (Nick Drake, the Stones, Van Morrison, even the theme from the Peanuts Christmas TV special). Song-laden as the film is, the aesthetic is worlds away from the whiz-bang MTV style: this is more a connoisseur's private jukebox, selected with dandyish disdain for hipness.

Much of the time, the mood is languid, even faintly narcotised. Then it suddenly explodes with exuberance: when Royal sets out to educate his grandsons in the joys of recklessness, or in a frenzied case history of Margot's secret love life, zipping between Paris and Papua New Guinea to a breakneck Ramones track. The story is crammed with such digressions, micro-narratives that in any other film would have been laboriously pursued subplots in their own right: the succession of Etheline's posh suitors, the story of Margot's lost finger, the louche career of the family's Indian retainer (Kumar Pallana). Similarly, the screen is crammed with visual details we barely have time to catch, such as the bizarre illustrations on the walls of the Tenenbaum children's nursery. (You imagine the eventual DVD will be a goldmine for pedants and fetishists.) Anderson's last film, the other-worldly screwball comedy Rushmore, was bizarre enough, but The Royal Tenenbaums rewrites the rules entirely, showing equal disregard for Hollywood convention and for the low-budget pieties of the independent school. Anderson, Owen Wilson and co have come up with something that feels genuinely unfamiliar: at once knockabout and poetic, comedy taken almost to the level of musical abstraction. This is a film you'll either love for its daring or loathe for its air of spoilt-smart-kid presumption, but it's like nothing else. Film of the year so far, novel of the year for sure.

j.romney@independent.co.uk