The Big Picture: The Royal Tenenbaums (15)

Meet America's new Royal family

What is wrong with this picture? This was the question that needled away at me during The Royal Tenenbaums, a film I'd been eagerly awaiting for months. Its director, after all, is Wes Anderson, whose enchantingly morose comedy Rushmore rang all kinds of weird bells, and gave Bill Murray his best role since Groundhog Day. Murray is also in this new film, as are Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Huston, Danny Glover and Gene Hackman, so that's something else to get excited about. The advance reports, the publicity stills, even the promotional posters (you may have seen one at a bus stop) all whip up a splendid sense of event.

And it's true, Anderson is a one-off, his tone so peculiar – lofty, dispassionate, serenely nutty – that one feels inclined to admire him, simply because he refuses to be like anyone else. The Royal Tenenbaums is notionally a comedy of family life, though it's blurred around the edges with darkness, depression and death; this isn't laughter through the tears, just a sad smile in the face of enveloping gloom.

The story takes place in a lugubrious New York townhouse which, like its inhabitants, has seen better days. Here live the Tenenbaums, a family of one-time geniuses and prodigies, all nursing various kinds of unhappiness: there's Chas (Stiller), a financial whizz and a widower who has two identical sons; and Richie (Luke Wilson), a tennis ace who froze during a tournament, jacked in his career and now pines secretly for the love of his stepsister Margot (Paltrow), a dried-up playwright who stares unblinkingly at the world through eyes raccooned with black mascara.

The house of Tenenbaum is thrown into chaos when the patriarch, Royal (Gene Hackman) shows up on the doorstep many years after he did a runner on the family. A reprobate and a con man, Royal wants to reconcile with his estranged wife, Etheline (Huston) and children, and deflects their scorn by pretending that he is terminally ill. Time has moved on since his absence; Etheline is on the verge of marrying her accountant (Glover), and his children, who ought to be in their prime, have an obscurely defeated air. This is the Royal inheritance, and in another sort of movie would be the cause of anguished soul-searching. Anderson takes a different angle, couching the movie as if he were introducing a famous novel, with shots of printed pages, chapter inter-titles and a voice-over narration – it's as though Preston Sturges were directing The Magnificent Ambersons.

The effect is to put the story between quotation marks, reminding us that we've entered a make-believe world, almost a cartoon world – like the Simpsons, the Tenenbaums always tend to wear the same clothes: a tomato-red Adidas tracksuit for Chas, a mink coat for Margot, a raffish grey pinstripe for Royal. This vaguely Seventies garb is an outward signal of inner stasis, like the Borg tennis headband Richie wears with his camel-coloured lounge suit.

Anderson loves these throwback details, and distributes them around the movie as if curating an exhibition of adolescent memorabilia. At one point in the movie, two characters have an important conversation inside a yellow tent, which wouldn't be noteworthy but for the fact that the tent is pitched in the middle of a living room. As the camera fronts up to the characters, you can't help noticing an old Dansette nearby with a tiny toy car glued to its frame. The meaning of these knick-knacks and fripperies could cut either way – a clinging to the lucky charms of childhood, or further evidence of arrested development – but their artful placement has the effect of highlighting the production design at the expense of the emotional content. (I remember the toy car, but I've forgotten that conversation).

Anderson has a meticulous compositional sense, and his preference for tableaux and posed symmetries suggests a very refined aesthetic – he could become the Peter Greenaway of dysfunctional comedy, if he's not careful. The problem is that there's nothing very heartfelt behind his funky stylisations. Rushmore had its share of wilful eccentricity, too, but it was mostly tethered around the single figure of Max, a would-be prodigy whose strangeness is out of step with the world. This time everybody's a kook or a freak, and the way in which Anderson and his co-writer Owen Wilson (who also stars as a mescalin-addicted novelist) tend to let talk veer off at weird tangents only compounds the resolute quirkiness of it all.

The characters seem reduced to nothing but their peculiarities, like Chas's persistent instruction of the fire drill to his kids because he's neurotic about their safety, or Margot's secret cigarette habit, or Richie's taste for sea travel. You get the feeling that these things are meant to amuse, but that feeling very seldom gives way to laughter. Only Gene Hackman as the fraudster father seems alive and alert to the possibilities of fun. His deep growl and mischievous twinkle provide the film with some much-needed vim, and his instruction of Chas's sons – in go-carting, shoplifting, and riding on the side of garbage trucks – goes happily against the grain of their uptight dad. He also manages to put a skew on his lines that makes them sing. "I don't think you're an asshole," says his wife, "I think you're an SOB."

"Well, I really appreciate that," he replies, touched.

I think The Royal Tenenbaums is the sort of film that wins critical acclaim, but leaves paying audiences slightly disappointed. The idea of a family faltering towards a collective breakdown has promise, but Wes Anderson's control-freak tendencies choke the life out of it. It's over-designed and under-felt. While there's no denying his talent, he seems caught here between madcap ensemble and compassionate family saga; he doesn't seem able to meld the two. God knows, the movies need the offbeat and wigged-out like never before, but they're not much fun as ends in themselves.