I know you're not very good with disappointment.
The first time I saw Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, I must confess I found it to be rather overstuffed. This is not to say I didn't enjoy it, but compared to his sleek sophomore effort Rushmore, it just had so many more characters who came with so much baggage (both metaphorical and literal) that it was impossible to get a bead on any of them. Seeing it again now, though, I find it to be much more navigable, partially because I've become familiar with Anderson's quirks as a filmmaker, but mostly because I can recognize that it has an easy-to-grasp through-line: As a family, the Tenenbaums have run aground, and it's up to pariah patriarch Royal (a never-better Gene Hackman) to set them right and get them back on course.
A self-consciously literary tale, with Alec Baldwin's narrator as our guide, The Royal Tenenbaums makes use of a prologue to breezily introduce us to its "family of geniuses" and give us a sense of just how high they flew before, one by one, they came crashing down to Earth. It all starts when Hackman is asked to leave by his wife (Anjelica Huston) for reasons that are never explicated, although it's pretty clear that she doesn't consider him to be a good influence. Absented from their lives, he has to watch from the sidelines while financial whiz Ben Stiller, promising playwright Gwyneth Paltrow and tennis pro Luke Wilson all grow up and fail to live up to their early promise.
Stiller's business acumen doesn't fail him, but the trauma of losing his wife in a plane crash has made him overly concerned about the safety of his two boys. Meanwhile, Paltrow has stopped writing and become increasingly distant from and unfaithful to her husband, neurologist Bill Murray (who's making a case study of a curious subject played by Stephen Lea Sheppard, late of Freaks and Geeks). As for Wilson, he had a meltdown during a championship match and has literally been at sea for over a year, severely conflicted about his feelings for Paltrow (who was adopted, so it's not as icky as it sounds, although it kind of still is).
As if that wasn't enough, Huston's business manager (the always-welcome Danny Glover) declares his love for her and urges her to obtain a divorce from Hackman, and their longtime neighbor from across the street (Owen Wilson, who co-wrote the film with Anderson) also makes plain how much he'd like to be considered part of the family. Clearly, Hackman has his work cut out for him if he's going to straighten out all those crossed wires, and his first gambit -- faking a terminal illness with the help of faithful retainer Kumar Pallana and amenable elevator operator Seymour Cassel so he can get back into their good graces long enough to make amends for his past transgressions -- fails so spectacularly that it takes a couple of genuine family crises for him to prove his worth and sincerity. Of course, that shouldn't have been too hard. He is a character in a Wes Anderson film, after all.