The Royal Tenenbaums: How Wes Anderson Masterfully Juxtaposes Mise-En-Scene and Narrative

I am a firm believer that Wes Anderson’s 2001 dramedy, The Royal Tenenbaums, is the auteur’s best film. It’s the epitome of cinematic beauty from the mise-en-scene, characters, writing, and overall film design. Anderson is a director who has curated a precise style throughout his filmography; the audience gets to watch a highly sophisticated film that is concurrently simple in that it bequeaths information and instruction. He uses massive tonal shifts in a way that keeps his films light and multiplex simultaneously, and he is one of the only directors in modern Hollywood that can pull off an incredible lack of suspense in his movies. Wes Anderson stands out amongst other directors today because of his fantastic aesthetic; it’s charming yet disturbing, which is why The Royal Tenenbaums works so well. It’s a heartbreaking movie, full of characters at their breaking points being pushed through extreme events. Still, Anderson’s stylistic use of mise-en-scene, color, soundtrack, and blunt acting juxtaposes the film’s themes of separation, failure, and love. 

Anderson’s playful nature in The Royal Tenenbaums comes from the perspective that the film is told through. The film delivers information about the characters bluntly, almost like he is explaining the story to a child. The movie is about child prodigies, and the film’s sadness comes from the fact that these childhood gifts don’t age with grace. In maturity, the Tenenbaum children are all failures. Every day they live their lives in the shadow of their past as child prodigies. Because things came easy to them as children, they have trouble coping with failure in adulthood, making them highly broken people. As Anderson explains how the characters got to their current state, he does so with his unique style. Using bright colors, upbeat music, and incredible mise-en-scene, it feels as though we are reading a children’s book. He delivers heartbreaking information about the characters in such a digestible way. It feels as though this film was made by a ten-year-old but in the best way possible. Anderson’s films are a fantastic reminder that Hollywood movies don’t need to hold you in suspense to deliver traumatic details about the narrative. 

A scene where the jolly mise-en-scene propels the narrative forward is early in the film when Royal Tenenbaum is separating from his wife and leaving his children, which sets the psychological and implicative scenery for the rest of the movie. The moment Royal sits his children around the dining room table and tells them he’s leaving them introduces the audience to the frankness that will remain throughout the film. This scene creates a physical separation between Royal and his children in two ways. The first is that they are sitting at opposite ends of the table, the children on one end and Royal on the other, the two groups never in the same shot until the end of the sequence when we see the backs of the children’s heads while Royal sips a drink. By announcing he will not raise them, there is a severe emotional separation that we can see when they’re united in adulthood. This scene is the first introduction to the fact that the Tenenbaum family does not exist as a clan. On paper, this is a heavy and emotional scene. Yet, Anderson’s use of bright warm tones, the sweet instrumentals of Hey Jude, animated costumes, and a narrator truly makes this feel like a children’s book, softening the inherent misery of this film. The incredible contrast in this scene leaves the audience disoriented and fascinated.