The Fall of the House of Tenenbaum

What have become of my Royal Tenenbaums?

Over the last few years, a series of seemingly unrelated events have conspired to make me consider with grim perplexity the fate of the cast of one of the favorite movies from my vanished youth, Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums.

I was 18 when I first saw—and saw and saw again—The Royal Tenenbaums, which, in its remarkably close approximation of the J.D. Salinger short stories I had gobbled up as an adolescent, played like a cinematic transcription of my imagination. The movie offered an immensely appealing vision of genteel cosmopolitanism: The fictitious Tenenbaums were a brood of well-off but listless one-time enfants terribles who rattled around their Manhattan brownstone with their mink coats, perfectly turned phrases, and infinite treasury of troubles. 

Each of the spawn of Royal and Etheline Tenenbaum (the parents played by the late Gene Hackman and Anjelica Huston) began life as would-be virtuosos: Chas was a financial impresario, Margot a playwright of accomplishment, Richie an ace tennis player. But the trio of Tenenbaum siblings failed to capitalize on their early promise. 

“In fact, virtually all memory of the brilliance of the young Tenenbaums had been erased by two decades of betrayal, failure, and disaster,” says the film’s narrator—played, significantly, by an unseen Alec Baldwin.

Now to the point behind this reminiscence: I confess that my mind turned to Baldwin’s ominous assessment of the outcomes experienced by the imaginary Tenenbaums when watching the actor’s own very real reality show, The Baldwins on TLC.

If ever a program represented the downfall of a once-notable talent, this is it. The show was seemingly dreamt up to boost the flagging public image of Baldwin, who was then in the midst of criminal proceedings that resulted from a truly awful accident on the set of a movie: In 2021, while shooting the Western Rust, Baldwin’s prop gun discharged a bullet that resulted in the death of the cinematographer. (The charges were dismissed while the trial was underway last summer.) The Baldwins works overtime to showcase the softer side of its star, but when compared against his once-impressive movie career, it is pretty tepid stuff: Alec has gone from costarring with Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October to giving the folks at home a tour of his closet. How the mighty have fallen.

That’s when it occurred to me: Many of the Tenenbaums have lost some of their royal sheen in recent years.

Let us take the case of Gwyneth Paltrow, who played, with great indolent charm, the adult version of Margot Tenenbaum. Since she appeared in The Royal Tenenbaums some twenty-four years ago, Paltrow has starred in a grand total of three movies for which I have purchased a ticket: 2002’s Possession (a ho-hum literary adaptation), 2003’s Sylvia (a creditable biopic of Sylvia Plath), and 2005’s Proof (a ho-hum theatrical adaptation). I have missed (or avoided) the entire corpus of Iron Man. So inconsequential is Paltrow’s post-Margot screen career that my most vivid recollection of her from the last quarter century is her “appearance” in a 2023 civil trial in which a skiing eye doctor asserted that she bore responsibility for a ski collision some years back. The goofy legal proceedings were televised, etching in my memory her scoffing expression as the plaintiff gave his version of events and her supercilious answer on the stand when asked about how the incident in question had affected her: “Well, I lost half a day of skiing.”

Then there is the matter of Hackman—Mr. Royal Tenenbaum himself. Having long ago called it quits on his screen career, Hackman made his permanent home in Arizona in what everyone assumed was complete contentment—“assumed” because he seldom made himself available, post-retirement, to the press. After all, hadn’t the star of The French Connection, Hoosiers, and Unforgiven earned the right to while away his golden years without the inquiries of reporters or agents? But, in the fullness of time, it turned out that Hackman had perhaps too much solitude: In late February, the bodies of Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, were discovered in their home after having died at some ill-defined earlier point. Authorities later disclosed that Hackman was felled by heart disease—some number of days after his wife had perished after contracting hantavirus. All endings are sad, but this was one both sad and strange. 

What about the rest of the cast? Well, Luke Wilson—aka Richie Tenenbaum—was unable to replicate the cinematic success of his sibling Owen Wilson, though Owen, a mere supporting player in The Royal Tenenbaums, hasn’t exactly lit the world on fire lately: If you had heard of his recent movies Bliss (2021), Marry Me (2022), or Secret Headquarters (2022), you were one step ahead of me. I grant that appearing in little-seen motion pictures is not so cruel a destiny as facing a criminal trial, like Baldwin; or making a fool of yourself in a civil trial, like Paltrow.

Am I saying that the cast of The Royal Tenenbaums is cursed? Not quite. My point is more prosaic: Not even glamorous and successful movie stars who had starred in what seemed like a charmed movie are exempt from the fickle finger of fate. 

“Betrayal, failure, and disaster” were the words Baldwin used to describe the Tenenbaums. Phew—he was more right than he knew.

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