The Royal Tenenbaums became my favorite movie before I even saw it.

Between its perfect mini movie poster that I clipped from the pages of Entertainment Weekly and taped to the wall above my bed, the various trailers, and the quirky official website where it was impossible to click on a Dalmatian Mouse, the movie — or at least its promotional materials — felt tailor-made for me.

And yet I didn’t see it during its theatrical run. I can blame Christmas vacation scheduling conflicts, a lack of friends who wanted to drive the 40 minutes from Brevard to Asheville to see it, and not yet being the bold solo theater-goer you know today. But it’s possible that the extra six months of waiting made my eventual first viewing all the sweeter.

On the morning of Tuesday, July 9, 2002, I drove to Star Video, arriving minutes after they opened to rent Wes Anderson’s third feature on VHS. Back home, miraculously without a speeding ticket, I popped in the tape, sat on the sofa, and, from the opening notes of Mark Mothersbaugh’s score as the Touchstone Pictures logo worked its way across the screen, felt like I was achieving some divine purpose.

That novel sensation was sustained throughout the film’s intricate opening chapter — appropriately enough, a faithful imagining of a chapter from a fictional novel called The Royal Tenenbaums — an introduction to a level of cinematic craft previously unexperienced by my senses.

In tandem with a lovely, subsequent instrumental version of “Hey Jude,” Anderson packs a staggering amount of detail into each frame, announcing his filmmaking aesthetic just as clearly as the stoic narration from a pre-30 Rock Alec Baldwin (an extremely odd casting choice at the time) informs viewers of the titular family of child geniuses and their fall from grace.

While the layered, info-laden creativity shares a decent amount of cinematic DNA with Max Fischer’s yearbook montage in Rushmore, since by then I’d yet to properly appreciate the greatness of Anderson’s second full-length work, Tenenbaums’ leap forward in every conceivable manner felt even more significant.

This whirlwind of imagination holds steady throughout the director’s 110-minute opus, delivering steady humor and disarming moments of beauty as the now-adult Richie (Luke Wilson), Chaz (Ben Stiller), and Margot Tenenbaum (Gwyneth Paltrow) navigate their specific brands of arrested development, back under the roof of 111 Archer Avenue where their personalities, desires, and wounds were forged years before.

Somehow behaving even more immaturely is their estranged father Royal (Gene Hackman, in his last great performance), who’s conned his way back into the family home under the pretext of terminal cancer and may or may not want to rekindle things with his wife Etheline (Angelica Huston), despite her sort-of engagement to the awkward yet lovable Henry Sherman (Danny Glover).

Royal’s flawed attempts at reconciliation inspire occasional flashbacks that sketch in key character components, from Richie’s tennis match meltdown in response to his secret crush/adopted sister’s recent marriage to the comically level-headed Raleigh St. Clair (Bill Murray), to the grisly story behind Margot’s missing finger, while also making new memories.

The montage of Royal leading Chaz’s sons Ari (Grant Rosenmeyer) and Uzi (Jonah Meyerson) in a prank-filled melee across the city, perfectly cued to Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard,” proves particularly masterful. Easily the film’s giddy pinnacle, the sequence simultaneously carries a hint of melancholy at the newly-dubbed “Pappy”’s inability to provide that kind of unfiltered love and attention to the boys’ father, both when Chaz was their age and today.

The balance of comedy and tragedy by Anderson and co-writer Owen Wilson (who also earns some of the film’s biggest laughs as Margot’s boy toy and Richie’s best friend, Eli Cash) conveys a maturity well beyond their then early 30s, along with an anarchic playfulness that they must have been bottling up all their lives — and in many ways have still yet to abandon 20 years later.

So entranced was I by this initial viewing that, after being granted parental approval, I called up a handful of friends whom I was confident would appreciate the film’s charms, and invited them over to watch it that night. (They all loved it, too.) The single-day double dip was a personal first, and within a week I’d purchase the soundtrack and Criterion Collection DVD, which I’d watch with Anderson’s commentary track a few weeks later while recovering from wisdom teeth surgery.

I’ve since viewed The Royal Tenenbaums roughly 20 additional times — including once on the big screen, thanks to fellow fan Ken Hanke’s programming for the Asheville Film Society — and the higher that number gets, the clearer Anderson’s directorial brilliance shines.

What was previously a visually unremarkable moment like Margot waiting in Eli’s car while he scores drugs suddenly reveals itself to be a showcase of Scorsese-like finesse camerawork and Kubrickian precision framing, further augmented by the intentional placement of a homeless man with a shopping cart in the background. And though the film’s emotional climax — a long, uncut crane shot that checks in with each major character in the aftermath of Etheline’s and Henry’s first wedding attempt — is impressive at first sight, the technical, dramatic, and narrative prowess on display improbably grow richer with each revisit.

It’s this well-roundedness and continual discovery that prompted me in a mid-2010s IndieWire CriticWire survey to name The Royal Tenenbaums the best film of the 2000s thus far. Zodiac, Inglourious Basterds, There Will Be Blood, and No Country for Old Men were next in line, but none felt as fully-realized a cinematic vision as Anderson’s film. 

Closing in on the 20th anniversary of its theatrical release, it remains a reliable source of joy, sadness, and wonder that manage to move me a little bit more each go-round. I truly believe it was meant to be an integral part of my life, and that existence is all the better for it. 

Grade: A-plus. Rated R. Available to rent via Amazon Video, iTunes, and other streaming services; to borrow via your local public library; and to purchase from The Criterion Collection.

Click here to read the other reviews in Poprika’s Wes Anderson Collection series, all written by NC-based critics.

(Photo: The Criterion Collection)