Unsung Heroes: Alec Baldwin in 'The Royal Tenenbaums'

Michael C. here from Serious Film for this week’s episode of Unsung Heroes. When Nathaniel first contacted me about a weekly column I remember him encouraging his contributors to delve into their cinematic obsessions. Well, in that spirit, my cinematic obsessions don’t get any more obsessive than my love for this film. I give you The Royal Tenenbaums.

Alec Baldwin’s vocal performance as the Narrator in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenebaums is one of those things that makes a film lover like myself shake his head and smile, it is just so damned perfect. It is a casting decision that can appear random on paper, but which becomes instantly indelible as soon as it's heard. Of course pretty much every choice in Tenenbaums is dead on – from the Dalmatian mice to the briefly glimpsed posters for Margot’s plays - but this choice has always stood out to me as particularly inspired.

For one thing, this was well before Baldwin was racking up the awards as Jack Donaghy so Wes’s casting of him as the voice of his film was quite the out-of-the-box choice. He has a fantastic voice, but it doesn’t have that storybook quality that you normally associate with narrators. It lacks that soothing gentleness that voices like Morgan Freeman's or Roscoe Lee Brown's (Babe’s narrator) have in spades. Baldwin recounts the story of the Tenenbaums in perfectly neutral tones but still manages to slip the smallest edge into his delivery. An almost imperceptible spin that would have been lacking in another narrator. When, for example, Royal declares that the recent days with his family were probably the happiest of his life, Baldwin is able to deliver the line,

Immediately after making the statement, Royal realized that it was true.

in a way that is somehow both without inflection and overwhelmingly sad. Come to think of it, Baldwin’s flat delivery which comes freighted with heavy emotional baggage is the perfect aural equivalent for Wes’s visual style.

One of the most pleasant surprises of the past decade or so was watching the metamorphosis of Alec Baldwin from straight-forward leading man to the invaluable character actor who pops up in Scorsese movies and steals every scene not nailed down. As an action hero he was good, but as a supporting player he is priceless. His memorably subtle work as the narrator in Tenenbaums is actually a pretty accurate demarcation line between the two phases of Baldwin’s career. It was around that time that he let go of his matinee idol looks and relied instead on his flawless comic timing and apparently bottomless supply of priceless line readings. I would love to see Baldwin go all the way and appear on screen in an Anderson film. His dead pan could go stone face to stone face with any in Wes's stock company.

It is often said that there are so many obstacles to getting a film made, so many opportunities for things to go wrong, that it’s a wonder any films get made at all. When a film arrives that is not just good but is an example of every detail going exactly right it is borderline miraculous. The Royal Tenenbaums is in my view such a film, which is doubly amazing because I can think of no film more richly detailed than The Royal Tenenbaums.