Why The Royal Tenenbaums Is Now The Perfect Gene Hackman Swansong

Royal O’Reilly Tenenbaum 1932-2001: Died Tragically Rescuing His Family From The Wreckage Of A Destroyed Sinking Battleship
– Royal Tenenbaum’s epitaph

Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) is not Gene Hackman’s final film. (The actor would go on to make two more films after its release, finally entering his retirement after the 2004 satire Welcome To Mooseport.) But it feels now, in the wake of the sad news of his death at the age of 95, that Tenenbaums — a witty, warm comic family drama about a flawed patriarch who re-enters his family’s life after years of absence and estrangement — is a beautifully appropriate swansong for the beloved actor. In its own sardonic, eccentric sort of way, it is a story of a man in his twilight years, reaching the end of his life and surveying what he has, what he misses, what he values. It is sweet, it is surprising, and in a career disproportionately stacked with brilliant performances, it possesses one of the best Gene Hackman performances ever recorded on celluloid.

Royal Tenenbaum is, like The French Connection’s Popeye Doyle or The Conversation’s Harry Caul, the consummate everyman — which is to say, a real person, as opposed to a well-worn movie character type. (“I was trained to be an actor, not a star,” he once said.) And like any member of Hackman’s rogue’s gallery of everymen, Royal is no hero. He is a liar, a cheat, a con artist, a casual racist, a man capable of shocking tactlessness and cruelty (he repeatedly refers to his daughter Margot as “my adopted daughter Margot”). He is, as Anjelica Huston’s Ethel labels him, “a bastard”.

He is, in a backwards, befuddled, well-meaning sort of way, a true family man.

But in Hackman’s hands, he is also curiously likable and fantastically watchable, almost charming in his awfulness, magnetic in his maladroit manner. He straddles those thick contradictions with a charismatic ease and astonishing effortlessness. He is, in a backwards, befuddled, well-meaning sort of way, a true family man. “Dammit,” he tells his faithful companion Pagoda (Kumar Pallana), “… I want this family to love me.”

Behind the scenes, there was little love lost. The stories of Hackman’s unhappiness with the film are now legion. Wes Anderson, who wrote the role of Royal with the veteran actor in mind, courted him for over a year, until Hackman eventually gave in. “It was written for him against his wishes,” is how Anderson later put it. “I just kept bothering him. I wore him down. Eventually he just caved.” Their working relationship didn’t get any easier once on set: Hackman’s airy, naturalistic approach clashed with Anderson’s meticulous, carefully calibrated directing style. “He was not a relaxed, comfortable person in my company,” is how Anderson diplomatically put it. (It did not go unnoticed that Hackman would later write a book on the American Civil War, tellingly titled ‘Escape from Andersonville’.) It’s possible, too, that Hackman had simply fallen out of love with the process of making films by this point, later reporting that he found the business “very stressful” and was no longer willing to make “the compromises that you have to make in films” — without naming names.

Still, The Royal Tenenbaums would quickly enter the pantheon of films with troubled productions turned near-masterpieces on screen. It remains one of Anderson’s best, composed of a gorgeous kaleidoscope of textures and tones, and Hackman’s Royal skilfully embraces and embodies the many shades of humanity, the flaws and the foibles and the fortitudes. For one thing, the actor demonstrates a remarkable capability for comedy that filmmakers across his extensive filmography did not always recognise, a doyen at deadpanning, even in a film that also contains Bill Murray. Royal’s response to Henry (Danny Glover) calling him a “son of a bitch”, as opposed to “an asshole”, for example, is to sincerely respond: “Well, I really appreciate that.”

The film’s final moments, in particular, carry an extra resonance in reflecting on Hackman’s death.

He creates space, too for unironic fun, summoning energy that belies his septuagenarian age at the time. (A benefit of forever looking middle-aged, Hackman clearly found, was to gain a certain timelessness.) One of the film’s most memorable sequences sees Royal learning to be a grandfather for the first time with his risk-averse grandsons Uzi and Ari; in a genuinely joyful montage, we witness the unlikely trio going horseback riding, go-karting, gambling, shoplifting, and running willingly into traffic — all set to Paul Simon’s ‘Me And Julio Down By The School Yard’ (one of Anderson’s best needle-drops).

Most movingly, though, Hackman finds room for Royal to be gentle and generous and vulnerable, sometimes in almost the same breath as his assholery. Consider the sly twinkle with which Hackman delivers the out-of-nowhere line, “I want to thank you for raising our children,” leaving Anjelica Huston looking visibly stunned. Or even more touchingly, the response to the famous line, “I’ve had a rough year, Dad,” from Ben Stiller’s Chas: “I know you have, Chassie.” There is fatherly warmth and understated tenderness in how Hackman delivers this line while gently gripping Stiller’s shoulders — but also relief at how he is welcomed back into the fold, the ice between them finally thawing. Hackman is a magician at making all this humanity seem authentic, real, lived-in.

This is, ultimately, a film about life and death and mortality. Royal grapples with his, at first fraudulently, and then actually, faking a cancer diagnosis before finally suffering a fatal heart attack at the end of the film. The film’s final moments, in particular — of a man finally finding meaning and connection and redemption — carry an extra resonance in reflecting on Hackman’s life and career and, now, death. “In his will,” notes the film’s narrator, Alec Baldwin, “he stipulated that his funeral take place at dusk. No one spoke. But it was agreed among them that Royal would have found the event to be most satisfactory.” Even Hackman himself, who never truly appreciated his experience as a Tenenbaum, might find room to agree with that.