Sometimes you have to learn how to experience a work of art, and that's how it's proved for me with The Royal Tenenbaums. It's come about largely through watching successive Anderson films (Tenenbaums was my first), and in the process coming to very much take his cinematic idiom and aesthetic to heart, with the result that on this rewatch, the film's poignancy came through unobscured by the undeniably arch, mannered style in which Andeson works - not least in the way that it takes as one of its primary themes disappointment and in the many losses that structure its plot. And yet, too, it's both entertaining and in the end allows its characters the kindness of as happy an ending as they could each have hoped for, given where they had started from.
