Anderson Countdown Part 3 - The Royal Tenenbaums

Hello everyone and welcome to Some Like It Scott's newest Countdown miniseries: the Wes Anderson Countdown. To honor one of the great still-working indie writer-director auteurs, who's next film ASTEROID CITY comes out later this year, Scott, Scott, and Jay will be watching all 10 of the American filmmakers' works to-date, from his origins with the '90s heist-comedy BOTTLE ROCKET, all the way to his latest feature, 2021's star-studded anthology drama THE FRENCH DISPATCH. Join us each week over the next 10 weeks as we progress through Anderson's full oeuvre in the buildup to ASTEROID CITY!

On the third episode of the Anderson Countdown, Scott, Scott, and Jay review Wes Anderson's 2001 family comedy-drama, THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS. Created in the same style as RUSHMORE - directed by Wes Anderson and co-written by Anderson and Owen Wilson - THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS is narrated by Alec Baldwin but led by Tenenbaum family patriarch, Royal (Gene Hackman), who has been separated for over 20 years from his wife, Etheline (Anjelica Huston), who has custody of their 3 children, Chas (Ben Stiller), Richie (Luke Wilson), and the adopted Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), all savants in one subject or another in their own right and who Royal takes advantage of without giving much, if anything, in return. Now down on his luck, Royal is evicted from the hotel he had been living in, and has nowhere to go except crawling back to the house where Etheline now lives out her retirement years. There, he learns that Etheline's new boyfriend, an accountant named Henry (Danny Glover), has proposed to her, and as a result, fakes having stomach cancer to try to win back his wife's and children's affections through pity. Chas, whose wife recently died as a result of a plane crash and who has become overprotective of his two children, Ari and Uzi; Richie, who is traveling the world on a cruise ship following his most recent breakup and who professes his love of his adopted sister Margot to his not-quite friend and confidant Eli (Owen Wilson); and Margot, who is married to an older neurologist, Raleigh St. Clair (Bill Murray) and who is depressed and hiding this fact from her husband and family; are all summoned to their father's "deathbed", a ruse which of course unravels rather quickly as each member of the Tenenbaum family is deeply familiar with Royal's wiliness. Royal will have to work a lot harder to win back the favor of his somewhat-estranged family and maybe even find personal redemption along the way. The countdown crew give their thoughts on Anderson's third film, including the nuanced themes, the ensemble cast's performances, and how Anderson's filmmaking style continues to refine and evolve.