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| The Royal Tenenbaums |
Families are often complex units that can be highly functional and supportive, nurturing happy and successful individuals. They can also be highly destructive to the mental health of its members and do irreparable damage. They can also be anywhere in the vast land between those two extremes. Families are the home base from which we start life. Later we can form our own. Many of us model our own parenting style and philosophy based on how we were raised. Many of us try to do the opposite.
Families come in various sizes. They can be as small as mom, dad and one child. There can be multiple children, there can be grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins included. There can be children who are adopted. Some families are close and loving. Some families spend a modicum of time together. Many close, loving families are also restrictive and repressive. Some families that are not tightly-knit nonetheless adequately fulfill the needs of its members.
Some families fight constantly. Some with real rancor and others harmlessly with no ill will. Some families hold in their feelings towards one another. Much goes unsaid. Resentments brew.
Movies that focus on a family too often deal in stereotypes. Maybe the mom is a typical nag or perhaps she is totally self-sacrificing, tolerant and a buffer to a temperamental father. The Dad can be a tyrant or he can be a milquetoast whose every other utterance to his wife is, “yes dear.” Rarely do motion pictures give every family member their own unique identity and rarer still do they seem more than cardboard cut-outs.
But I found eight films that created interesting families that are either totally believable and relatable or thoroughly entertaining. All those selected are excellent movies most by one of filmdom's great directors. They are offered in no particular order.
Amarcord (1973) Fellini. The Biondi family is one of the great delights of cinema in one of the greatest of all films. To say they are eccentric is a massive understatement. The Father (Armando Brancia) is a construction foreman, and an anti-fascist who's demanding of his children. He also quarrels constantly with his wife (Pupella Maggio) a strong-willed woman, protective of her brood. When father's frustration grows too much he tries to "kill himself" by pulling his mouth apart with his hands pulling simultaneously up and down as if he can tear his head apart this way. There’s also a horny grandfather, an Uncle in a mental hospital who forgets to unzip before relieving himself, a lazy brother-in-law who wears a hair net, and of course the children, one of whom is the movie’s central character in a wild menagerie of them. Taken together they are a seemingly a hot mess but under the deft touch of director Federico Fellini they're grand fun.
Fanny and Alexander (1982) Bergman. The Ekdahl family. The story centers on the titular characters, especially the boy Alexander. It is partially through his young eyes that we meet this wonderful family led by the grandmother and matriarch Helena (Gunn Wallgren). She’s what one would call a “cool grandma.” She’s a vital, wise, handsome woman and likes to kick up her heels. Fanny and Alexander’s loving father dies early in our story and their lovely mother (Ewa Froling) makes the mistake of marrying a stern, cold-hearted bishop. The children go from a loving extended family of uncles, aunts and cousins in their virtual playground of a house to a austere, cold home with the bishop’s dour, dull-as-dust spinster sisters. It would be a shock to anyone. Unsurprisingly it all works out and they ultimately return to the Ekdahl wonderland.
The Godfather (1972) F. Coppola. The Corleones. Mom, Dad and five kids, four boys (one adopted) and a girl. They’re a prosperous. The parents are immigrants from Sicily who realized the American dream starting with nothing before building a business empire. Capitalism at its finest. True, their business is organized crime and ultimately two of the boys will be murdered and Dad will be badly wounded in a shooting. Oh, and and the daughter’s husband will be killed -- by order of one of her brothers. Family stuff. The children are all unique. The oldest son, Sonny (James Caan) will blend easily into the family business though his temper will prove a fatal flaw. The middle son, Fredo (John Cazale) will also go into the biz, but the poor sap is bumbling idiot, ill-suited for such serious work. Youngest son Michael (Al Pacino) initially wants nothing to do with the business side of his family. He’s a college boy who joins the marines when the U.S. enters World War II. Ahh but here is where our tale gets interesting. Fascinating Celluloid history. Michael changes. Boy does he ever. Circumstances force this transformation, but there’s something within the boy too. Ultimately he takes over the family business when Pop dies of natural causes. The Godfather is indeed a movie about the Mafia, but it is also about family. At that it excels. The sequel, Godfather Part 2, continues the story.
Radio Days (1987) Allen. There is mother (Julie Kavner), father (Michael Tucker), their son Joe (Seth Green) whose latter day narration guides us through this story set in the early 1940s. They live with an aunt, uncle and cousin. Radio Days is the story of how the radio was often the center of the household but in seeing the media’s effect we learn about this not always charming but always interesting family and its disparate members. They bicker, they support each other. They are quirky and eccentric and eminently relatable. Each are unique and fully realized in one of Woody Allen’s very best films. Radio Days, like the family it depicts, is touching, funny and relatable. Each family member is unique and memorable on their own merits, but would suffer mightily without the support of the family as a whole.
The Grapes of Wrath (1940) Ford. The Joad family. The displaced family. Torn from their home and sent across the country by the combined horrors of The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, in search of the Nirvana that California supposedly was. The Joads are one of literature’s most famous families. Through the brilliant direction of John Ford they became one of cinema’s most indelible families too. Henry Fonda stars as Tom Joad, whose story is the focal point of the family. He has an everyman quality which lends his family the same feeling. They are any of us who are unfortunate, who’ve become victims despite our hard work and best efforts. They were what happens when luck is all bad. They prove that when one door closes another one does not necessarily open. Jane Darwell as Ma Joad is perhaps film’s greatest representation of the power of motherhood. The family center holds despite misfortunate, even as some members leave or die.
The Ice Storm (1997) A. Lee. The four-member Hood Family. All families are of a particular time and place. This one is suburbia in 1973. Watergate is dominating the news. Hairstyles have uniformly changed. Many of the freedoms fought for in the Sixties are in place. Key parties are a thing. Bell bottoms and plaid are worn. Tobey Maguire as the son Paul is the center of the story. He’s in prep school developing a love of literature but a far greater love of the fairer sex which he pursues assiduously in the form of the delicious young Katie Holmes. His younger sister Wendy (Christina Ricci) is disaffected, moody, sexually curious and perhaps quite angry at her parents. She’s certainly got, as they say, “issues” — many of them. Then again everyone in this story does and that's rather the point. Ben and Elena (Kevin Kline and Joan Allen) are the parents. Ben is having an affair with a neighbor and isn’t fooling the missus. Emotions are stifled, appearances are kept. Life is awkward, something to be soldiered through. This is a dysfunctional, if fascinating and revealing family in one of the most honest portrayals of suburbia ever filmed.
Shadow of a Doubt (1943) Hitchcock. The Newton family and its Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotton). They’re a pretty ordinary group and that’s the trouble for the eldest, who like her uncle is also a Charlie. There’s no excitement in their lives. Mom and Dad (Patricia Collinge and Henry Travers) are agreeable, amiable folks who love their brood. (They’re a bit old to have an eight-year-old. This was an oddity of casting in the first forty or so years of films, parents in their fifties or sixties with young children.) Charlie (Teresa Wright) who appears to be nearing twenty, is clearly the driving force of the family and when her namesake Uncle (mom’s brother) comes for a visit she feels that the sun has come out after too many dreary days. Idyllic! The beloved uncle comes bearing gifts. But Uncle Charlie brings menace too. He’s not the hail-fellow-well-met he seems. Indeed he's a serial killer of rich widows, hence his wealth. Only young Charlie can see this. Families are often all about facades. The false front that fools everyone. The Newton family doesn’t even know — except for young Charlie — that their happy face is an illusion. It’s a fascinating story and one of Hitchcock's best.
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) W. Anderson. I defy you to find a more interesting film family that the Tenenbaums. I further challenge you to identify a weirder patriarch than Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman). He’s a rascal, a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat and a loving father. Here are a few quotes of his: “Anybody interested in grabbing a couple of burgers and hittin' the cemetery?”
“I'm very sorry for your loss. Your mother was a terribly attractive woman.”
“I've always been considered an asshole for about as long as I can remember.”
“Hell of a damn grave. Wish it were mine.”
The three children (Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson and Gwyneth Paltrow) are all madly eccentric in one way or the other — indeed in many ways. Only mom (Angelica Huston) has a touch of normalcy to her. It’s a mad crew that scrap and yell but ultimately get along…um, just fine? At the start of the movie they’ve all gone their separate ways but circumstances bring them all together and Royal makes himself the center of the ensuing insanity (he is the nexus wherever he goes). It makes for great hilarity but if you watch closely enough it’s also an insightful film. About families.
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