I really wanted to jump up and down after watching this movie. It just made me feel so good I wanted to hug it. It's not that often that a movie comes along that satisfies on so many levels. It was riotously funny, it was a poignant family drama, and it was a biting satire. It is the best thing that Wes Anderson, director of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, has put out. He and his writing partner, the comic genius Owen Wilson (and I do not mean that in jest; watch him in this movie) have reached a new high that is going to be difficult to top, but I look forward to their efforts.

Gene Hackman plays Royal Tenenbaum, the patriarch of a dysfunctional family of geniuses. There's the adopted sibling Margot, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, who wrote several plays, but now spends her time locked in the bathroom avoiding her husband Raleigh St. Clair, a writer and anthropologist played by Bill Murray. There's Chas, played by Ben Stiller, who is a financial whiz who got his father disbarred for various crimes. His wife recently died, and he is obsessively overprotective of his two sons, both of whom look exactly like him. And there's Richie, played by Luke Wilson, a tennis ace who suffered a hilarious breakdown after learning of his adopted sister's impending marriage, and has spent the last year hiding aboard a cruise ship. The matriarch of the family is Etheline, played by Angelica Houston, who is possibly the only member of the Tenenbaum family to ever think of anyone other than herself. Houston delivers the most restrained and nuanced performance of the ensemble cast. She has recently received a marriage proposition from Henry Sherman, her longtime accountant played by Danny Glover. This event precipitates a family reunion of sorts.

Stiller and his sons move back home because he's worried that his security system is inadequate, although he really just wants his mommy. Paltrow, hearing this, is outraged, and insists that she gets to move home too. When hearing of this, Wilson hurries back; a letter to his childhood friend Eli Cash, played to spacy perfection by Owen Wilson, tells us that he is in love with her. Finally, when he learns from his spy/servant Pagoda (played by Kumar Pallana) that his estranged wife is considering marriage, Royal himself concocts a plan to move back and defend his family. He hires the elevator operator from the hotel where he lives to play a doctor and tells the family that he is dying of cancer, and wants to settle his accounts with them.

The movie has a little of everything. It's a great comedy; I haven't laughed that hard in a theater in a while. Any number of scenes are side-splittingly funny, especially the ones involving the self-reflective drug addict Eli Cash, a Western writer who is called "the James Joyce of the West" (his apartment in particular had me laughing so hard my sides hurt). There's even a screwball chase scene that manages to be funny. It's a sadly funny love story, with Royal trying to win his wife back and Luke Wilson trying to figure out how to deal with his love for his adopted sister (the resolution to this potentially cringe-inducing subplot is a study in deftness). It's a great satire on the supposed joy of family interaction. The film's tagline is "Family is not a word, it's a sentence." In this film, it's a really entertaining novel.