Summary
When the Tenenbaums assemble, Henry confronts Royal about the fact that he’s lying about having stomach cancer. “How would you know?” Royal asks, to which Henry responds, “My wife had it.” He then announces that Royal made up his hospital and his doctor and has been lying to them, and Royal storms out of the room, while Chas calls for a taxi.
“I guess we’re back out on the street now, pal,” Royal says to Pagoda, and Ethel is shocked to hear that Pagoda was in on it. “Look, I know I’m gonna be the bad guy on this one, but I just wanna say that the last six days have been the best six days of probably my whole life,” Royal says to his family. The narrator says in voiceover: “Immediately after making this statement, Royal realized that it was true.” Royal leaves the house, telling Ethel that he thought he could win the family back and get rid of Henry, adding, “Plus, I was broke, and I got kicked out of my hotel.”
“He’s not your father!” Royal says to Margot outside, pointing at Henry, to which she replies, “Neither are you.” Pagoda comes out and stabs Royal in the stomach with a Swiss Army knife, and they both get in a cab uptown.
We are at the 375th Street Y. Pagoda nurses Royal’s wound in a room there, and tells him everything was Royal’s fault. “Yeah, I know, but dammit, I want this family to love me,” Royal says.
We see Margot walking on a pedestrian bridge where she meets Eli. “I’m not in love with you anymore,” he tells her. “I didn’t know that you were,” she says, adding that she isn’t in love with him either. Eli says that he knows she’s in love with Richie, which he calls “sick and gross.” Angrily, Margot says, “Do you send my mother your clippings? And your grades from college?” Eli says, “You never gave me the time of day till I started getting good reviews,” and Margot simply reminds him, “Your reviews aren’t that good.” Meanwhile, on a nearby rooftop, a private investigator takes a picture of the couple.
The scene shifts and we see Raleigh and Richie in the private investigator’s office. He hands Raleigh the report, and Raleigh looks at it. A montage of the information from the report begins, as a caption reads, “Tenenbaum, M. Background File.” We see Margot as a child buying cigarettes, learning that she started smoking at 12, escaped school at 14, got married in Jamaica at 19, had a lesbian affair in France at 21, got fondled on a publicity tour at 24, and had a number of other affairs throughout her 20s, including with Eli. Raleigh puts down the file, defeated, and Richie runs from the room.
We see Royal speaking to someone at the hotel where he used to live, discussing whether he can move back in. The manager informs him that he will think about it, as Pagoda and Royal get onto an elevator. Raleigh sleeps on a couch with his coat over his body, while Richie comes out of a bathroom with a bandage over his hand. He then closes the door of the bathroom, cuts his hair, shaves his beard and cuts himself with a razor to commit suicide. Raleigh’s young test subject, Dudley, finds Richie’s body on the ground and they rush him to the hospital.
The Tenenbaums all rush to the hospital. Richie is sitting upright in bed, totally fine, as his family gathers around. “Why’d you try to kill yourself?” Chas asks, bluntly, and Richie tells him that he wrote a suicide note right after he regained consciousness, but he doesn’t want anyone to read it. Margot watches from the doorway.
We see Royal, now working as an elevator operator at the hotel. Pagoda tells him the news about Richie and he is shocked, closing the elevator and asking Dusty to cover for him as he rushes to the hospital. At the hospital, Raleigh says to Margot, “You’ve made a cuckold of me,” and she apologizes. He then blames Margot for Richie’s suicide attempt, and when Ethel is curious what he means, Margot brushes it aside. “She’s balling Eli Cash,” Raleigh says, asking for a cigarette and leaving.
Henry comes into the recovery room and asks how he can help. Ethel gets up and he helps her fill out some of the hospital forms. She embraces him. Later, Royal arrives at the hospital, but the front desk girl won’t let him go in and see Richie. Dejected, Royal and Pagoda leave, when suddenly they spot Richie outside getting on a bus to leave the hospital. The bus drives away and Royal simply says, “I’ve got to say, he didn’t look half bad for a suicide.”
Richie rides the bus to the Tenenbaum residence and climbs in a window. He climbs the stairs to the room where the tent is kept. Margot is sitting inside listening to records and the two of them sit and listen together. Richie shows Margot his stitches, and she comments on how horrible they look. He asks her about her ex-husband and her affair with Eli. Of her affair with Eli, Margot says, “We mostly just talked about you…I guess that was the attraction if you know what I mean.” They sit next to each other and profess their love for one another, kissing each other passionately. They lie down and Margot points out that they’re lying on the sleeping bag they took to the museum as children. Margot cries about Richie’s suicide attempt, kisses his hand, and leaves the tent, saying, “I think we’re just gonna have to be secretly in love and leave it at that Richie.”
Analysis
In this section of the film, Royal’s mistakes come back to haunt him, as Henry reveals to the family that their contrite patriarch was faking his illness all along. Things only get worse when Ethel confronts him about why he did it, and Royal admits that a major reason he came back to them was that he was broke and didn’t have a place to live. No one feels very sorry for the old man after what he’s pulled, and he is yet again all alone in the world. Richie, his most loyal child, won’t even give him sympathy after his lie, and his righthand man Pagoda stabs him in the stomach angrily before they leave.
The film addresses these darker moments and topics with a lighthearted absurdity. While it is a huge revelation that Royal has been lying, an outrageous moment of betrayal, Wes Anderson maintains an ambiguous loyalty to the no-good Royal and frames the reveal of his bad deeds with dark humor. In a world where everyone seems to take life too seriously, Royal's fault is that he doesn’t take life seriously enough, and this contrast between his almost-naive unawareness of his own immorality and the betrayed shock of his family members strikes a comic tone. Royal eats burgers and fries, smokes cigarettes, and drinks every day in spite of telling his family he has stomach cancer, and when his wife asks him why he came back, he baldly tells her that he needed a place to stay. These moments reveal Royal’s tone deafness, and the viewer can see why Ethel calls him a “bastard.” “Bastard” though he may be, he is at least being honest.
Indeed, much of the humor in The Royal Tenenbaums comes from the social ineptitudes of the characters. In many ways, this is the signature feature of Wes Anderson’s style of writing and direction. The actors often deliver their lines with a flatness of speech, a straightforward emotionlessness, which makes for awkward, but vivid encounters. An example of this facet of Anderson’s style can be found in Eli and Margot’s break-up. Eli says that he isn’t in love with Margot anymore, to which she replies, in a monotone, “I didn’t know you ever were.” Rather than initiate an emotion-filled argument that might usually accompany the dissolution of an affair, Eli simply says, “Let’s not make this any more difficult than it already is,” and Margot agrees.
Rather than stage arguments and emotional scenes between his characters, Anderson stages scenes of uncanny emotional straightforwardness, then lets emotions burst forth in unexpected ways. This gives the drama an almost childlike quality, as if no one knows how to communicate through a difficult scenario. And indeed, in the emotionally broken and damaged world of the Tenenbaums, this is often the case. After Raleigh reads Margot’s file, rather than show his emotion, he simply comments on the fact that Margot smokes. Richie bolts from the room. Thus we see that the emotional landscape of The Royal Tenenbaums is characterized not by grand demonstrations or displays, but by repression. This repression is part of what makes the dysfunctional family so humorous at moments, while also highlighting the ways that they are all, in certain ways, in a state of arrested development, never able to revisit their glory days.
Indeed, the emotions and problems bubbling beneath the surface are often intense and erratic, and violence hums under even the calmest scenes in the film. When Royal gets himself and Pagoda kicked out of the Tenenbaum residence, the usually-placid Pagoda is overcome with rage and stabs Royal in the stomach with a Swiss Army knife. The moment is violent and sudden, but never remarked upon; we simply see Pagoda dressing the wound later. Likewise, after hearing about Margot’s various affairs, Richie storms from the room, and emerges from the bathroom with a bandage on his hand, having clearly been cutting and hurting himself in response to the pain he feels. He then closes the door, and in private, attempts suicide. The bloody mess that he creates is met with a deadpan emotionlessness, as we see doctors and a stone-faced Raleigh push him through the halls of the hospital. In lieu of outward expression, the characters in The Royal Tenenbaums resort to sporadic means of expression that take on violent proportions.
