And the story, written by Anderson and Owen Wilson (Luke's brother, who also appears in the movie, doing a loopy turn as a Richie Rich neighbor kid who grows up to be a modern-day Zane Grey), ambles nowhere after that long setup. There's no dramatic electricity to draw you in or set you buzzing; with few exceptions, the characters' feelings and motivations are put on-screen in an expository, rather than visceral, way.

Most of the characters, particularly Stiller's, feel vague and unshaped. The device of dressing the present-day characters in grown-up versions of the same clothes they wore as kids feels forced and gimmicky in all cases but one: Paltrow, her eyes done up in thick, smoky rings of kohl, slinks around mousily in a big-girl's version of that same striped sports dress, with a mink coat thrown on top as her one conscious concession to adult mystery and glamour. She's like a mod version of those elegant, spookily remote Edward Gorey ladies.

Paltrow has some lovely moments with Luke Wilson, particularly a scene in which they huddle in the indoor tent Richie has set up in his old room at the homestead. (The eccentricities pile up in this movie like a heaping platterful of petits fours at a patisserie run by a neurotic baker.) He and Margot, connected by a special bond, talk to each other in a scene that has an uncharacteristic (for Anderson) low, quiet, swaying rhythm, set to the Rolling Stones' elegiac "She Smiled Sweetly." (Anderson has a good ear for music recorded before his time; he brings new audiences to it, and delights and surprises some older moviegoers, too.)

Most of the other actors look and feel lost in this 2-D showpiece of a movie. A subplot involving Etheline and her gentleman suitor, played by Danny Glover, feels particularly patched-in and seems to serve only as an excuse for some forced, unfunny banter between Glover and Hackman. But Hackman's Royal, crusty, enchantingly off-putting and not above cheap fakery if it means earning the love of his family (a love that, previously, he never had nor wanted), is the one character who resonates every time he's on-screen.

Hackman knows just what to do with Anderson and Wilson's lines, many of which are -- or, more accurately, should be -- genuinely funny. In trying to express sympathy to Chaz's children (played by Grant Rosenmeyer and Jonah Meyerson, they have the snidely poetic names "Ari" and "Uzi"), he sputters the most comforting line he can come up with: "I'm very sorry for your loss. Your mother was a very attractive woman." Realizing that he didn't spend enough time with his own kids, he takes Ari and Uzi under his wing. The movie's best sequence shows him teaching them to jaywalk and shoplift cartons of juice. One triumphant snippet shows Hackman zipping along on a tiny go-cart: It's a grand visual gag.

But Hackman's turn only points up the monotonous failed jokes that make "The Royal Tenenbaums" so top-heavy, and ultimately topple it. A gag involving a gypsy cab is hilarious the first time and exhausting by the eighth. There were dozens of times I'd find myself staring in disbelief at the screen, realizing that joke after joke was brilliant and yet I'd barely laughed at all. Chaz's Dalmatian mice -- tiny, spotted, scampering things -- should have been one of the finest miniature visuals of the year. But when I saw them, they just seemed planted and obvious -- a detail so carefully mechanized to delight us that it simply doesn't. The jokes in "The Royal Tenenbaums" don't tickle you -- they wallop you.

Anderson's movies have the innocence of a crayoned drawing, which is part of what some moviegoers like about him. His ramshackle charm comes with a price, though: Anderson's movies are assertively asexual. They exist in a world where nothing so messy as sex intrudes except at the most basic childlike-crush level.

If there are essential nooks and crannies of human experience that Anderson finds yucky and off-putting, his alleged brilliance is going to hit the ceiling pretty soon. Meanwhile, though, his overconfident feyness, generally unbecoming in any artist above the age of 8, is already wearing thin. Like those rarefied, assertively cute mice, he's showing his spots. It's up to us whether to buy them or not.

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