Their Particular Brand of Dysfunction

TIMES FILM CRITIC Watching “The Royal Tenenbaums” is as close as we’re likely to get to being kidnapped by extraterrestrials and spirited away to their strange world. Director Wes Anderson, who also co-wrote the “Royal” script with actor Owen Wilson, unquestionably has one of America’s most distinctive filmmaking sensibilities, but that is part of the problem. Densely imagined, with the smallest character tendency and the tiniest on-set knickknack predetermined in almost fiendish detail, “The Royal Tenenbaums” is such a hermetic film that the Coen brothers’ work seems practically Capra-esque by comparison. “The Royal Tenenbaums” is a bleak farce set in an imaginary New York-ish city with landmarks like “the 375th Street Y” and “the Valenzuela Bridge.” It’s not about a royal clan like the Windsors but about one man’s family, the wife and children of Royal Tenenbaum, who at one time all resided in an enormous red brick pile that seems imaginary as well but turns out to be an actual house in Harlem not far from where Ralph Ellison wrote “The Invisible Man.” When the film’s main action opens, only Royal’s estranged wife Etheline lives in the house. ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ Gene Hackman.Royal Tenenbaum Anjelica Huston.Etheline Tenenbaum Ben Stiller.Chas Tenenbaum Gwyneth Paltrow.Margot Tenenbaum Luke Wilson.Richie Tenenbaum Owen Wilson.Eli Cash Bill Murray.Raleigh St. Clair Danny Glover.Henry Sherman Released by Touchstone Pictures.