On the day after Thanksgiving I watch The Royal Tenenbaums for maybe the fifth time. It isn’t a holiday movie exactly, but it’s this time of year I watch it. As I watch, questions lurk in the back of mind: Why is it my favorite movie of the twenty-first century? What does it touch so deeply in my soul; a touch that hasn’t released in nearly 25 years?

The Royal Tenenbaums as Therapy

The film is about the reunion of the dysfunctional and eccentric Tenenbaum family. When the estranged father, Royal, fakes a terminal illness, his three adult children are forced to confront the past, their betrayals, and complex relationships with each other, as well as their parents.

Royal Tenebaum is a cad and a conman, a disbarred attorney, who left the family two decades ago and now wants back into the lives of his children and his wife Etheline, to whom he never granted a divorce. He worms his way into Etheline’s house by lying about his condition, telling her that he has terminal stomach cancer. Etheline then calls her children—Margot, Richie, and Chas—home.

Eventually Royal’s elaborate ruse comes crashing down when Etheline’s love interest, the man who wants to marry her but can’t because she’s still legally married to Royal, discovers Royal isn’t sick at all. The pills masquerading as cancer drugs are Tic Tacs; the doctor whose care Royal claims to be under doesn’t exist and neither does the hospital he says is responsible for his treatment. In fact, the doctor is played by an elevator operator from the residential hotel Royal has been kicked out for failure to pay. He has run out of money and he’s jealous of Henry. His motives to reunite with his family are selfish and petty.

On learning this, the family tosses Royal from the house into a Gypsy cab along with his trusty valet, Pagoda. Together they move into a room at the Y. Neither has any money. From this low point, Royal makes the decision to play it straight, pay his dues, and gets jobs for himself and Pagoda as elevator operators in the hotel he once lived in. From there Royal embarks on a journey towards true reconciliation with his children and Etheline.

By the end of the film, everything is set right in the lives of each member of the family, and Royal dies sometime after having been loved by them in the remaining years of his life. His epitaph, which he wrote reads: “Died tragically rescuing his family from the wreckage of a destroyed sinking battleship.”

The film is comic and tragic all at once. Melancholy, loss, and betrayal each figure prominently. The heaviness is offset with humor and Anderson’s characteristic whimsy together with a focus on forgiveness and acceptance.

Royal and my dad had a lot in common. Both were sneaky, took shortcuts, and lacked empathy, especially for their kids. When Royal introduces his “adopted daughter, Margot” in the film, I’m reminded of how my father segregated my brother and me based on our places of birth. That he and my mother packed up my Canadian-born eleven-year-old brother and went to Hungary to make a me, a child whose origins would match Dad’s was a slap in the face to a sensitive boy who got the message that he was somehow less than, insufficient, stemming from something he had no control over.

The difference between Royal and my dad is that after his fakery and manipulations are discovered, Royal finally learns from his errors and earns his return to the fold by doing the work: making an honest living; giving Etheline her divorce so that she can marry Henry; approving Richie and Margot’s relationship even though it’s socially “frowned upon, but what isn’t these days;” saving his grandsons from certain death and buying them a dog to make up for the loss of the one they had. These gestures demonstrate Royal’s new-found capacity for sensitivity towards others’ needs and feelings ahead of his own.

My father did nothing to repair relationships. He may not have understood that he needed to, that we needed him to. The three of us—Dad, Mom, and me—moved around the country multiple times often separated from our community by more than one time zone, including my brother who quit high school and moved into the stable but imperfect home of our grandmother.

Dad kept his secrets to the end, and admitted no failures. Maybe he feared the truth would be worse, that such vulnerability could lead to erasure, and this prevented any public moments of reflection. His was a life of redaction. A redacted life offers no material for tributes at funerals. Had he at least written his own epitaph we might have gained some insight from it like we do from Royal’s. As it went, his grave has no epitaph, only a simple stone with his name, date of birth and date of death. None of us could think of something insightful and true to say at his interment, let alone carve it into stone. I mourned the loss of my biggest fan in silence.

The ending of the movie in which all are reconciled, their lives set right, and forgiveness reigns is what I wish for myself and my family. It’s regrettable that my father didn’t receive a send off in which his children squared up with the man and his memory, achieving some kind of harmony in the process. None of us understood who he loved or the nature of his desires, his drives. The memories he recounted with the most joy while he was alive didn’t include us, concerned instead with a distant Hungarian boyhood.

I sometimes wonder if his true nature was hidden from himself as well as us. He lived a life of shoulds, and those shoulds made me. They were both blessings and curses. If he really was gay, as I now suspect, and lived life openly he may never have married my mother, and I may not exist to have a story to tell. And so, here I am, flawed in my own way, out with lanterns looking for myself.

Shining a light on all of this history makes it possible for me to not only tell a story of myself but to alter its plot. The choices my parents made determined my beginnings, but I have some say about my middle and ending.

If, as the Gnostics said, exile is the human condition, and the object of our lives is to cross from exile to the light of consciousness, the light of the soul, to find home, then the Royal Tenenbaums plays out this universal journey crossing from exile to home not just in the case of Royal but also his three children.

The journey toward reconciliation with our beginnings is the hero’s journey for most of us. As we wander through a forest with no pre-existing path we become aware of the attic spaces, crawl spaces, and basements of our own psyches. The house we occupy has hidden rooms that we must be brave enough to enter with clear-eyed curiosity.

The sprawling multi-story house in Harlem the Tenebaums occupy is a symbol of the hidden rooms within each member of the family. There is Chas’s room with his Dalmatian mice, phones, files and computers; Richie’s pup tent with its record player and soft lighting, a hiding place within the room that showcases Ritchie’s art, every picture with Margot as its subject; the ancient kitchen with its wall phone; the room where Margot staged her early plays; the library of books about archeology, Etheline’s chosen profession; and even the imposing exterior entrance of steps leading to the front door speaks to the nature of this family.

The genius of the film is that the Tenenbaums can stand for any family. The story strikes a chord on a subconscious level, as all great stories do. The specifics of the Tenenbaum family aren’t the same as mine or yours, but the overall pattern of the film fills a universal emotional need. We want to connect with our kin and know that we are home.

And that is why The Royal Tenenbaums is a Thanksgiving story.