I know, I know. You all wanted a review of Impostor, and I do so hate to disappoint.

Luke and Owen Wilson, along with director-compadre Wes Anderson, have raised the bar with eccentric comedies twice in the past (Rushmore and the smalltime but classic Bottle Rocket), and have pretty much done it again. In a season (indeed, a year) devoid of solid gut-laugh comedy, Anderson and the Wilson's bring us not only gut-laughs but snickers, giggles, knee-slappers, and grinners. Yeah, The Royal Tenenbaums, while officially revoking the Terrible Threesome's status as indie darlings, serves up all that it promises.

It goes down like this. The titular Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman, in his best performance in years) is husband (more or less) to Etheline (Anjelica Houston), and father (sort of) to three geniuses: Chas the capitalist (Ben Stiller, with an impossible wig), Richie the tennis prodigy (Luke Wilson, ditto), and the adopted daughter Margot, the playwright (Gwyneth Paltrow, tragic and sexy). When the kid's ages are still measured in single digits, Etheline kicks Royal out. No explanation is given, but it is no great leap in logic to figure that Ethel plain didn't want to live with an asshole anymore.

Time passes, as it often does. All three have their moment in the sun as the prodigal children of America, the "genius Tenenbaums," but as adulthood wears on, obscurity asserts itself, and all three fall into a slump. Chas lost his wife in a freak accident and forever after trains his twin sons in emergency situations. Richie had a nervous breakdown on the tennis court, and can't quite let go of the game (neither can the tennis fans who spot him on the street). Margot marries a ludicrously genteel child psychologist (Bill Murray) that she hides positively everything from.

There's other stuff going on, of course. Eli Cash (Luke Wilson), lifelong family friend to the Tenenbaums, is a writer of trash Westerns and Margot's extramarital lover besides. Ethel, now an archaeologist (people are never just fucking cubicle-workers in movies, you know?), has received and is working on accepting a marriage proposal from her accountant (Danny Glover). Margot is locking herself in her bathroom for hours on end, feeding a smoking habit nobody's ever known she had. Richie, the closet romantic, has been in love with Margot since his early teens.

All of this serves as multi-layered backdrop, alternately funny and sad, for Royal. His news of impending death by stomach cancer (fictional or not, for a great portion of the movie we're not really sure) brings the children home, and sparks fly as never before. Royal's an asshole, see, but one that is really, really hard to hate. He is the kind of guy who will tell his twin grandsons that he regrets their mother's death because she was "very, very attractive," but will then take them out from under their father's tyrannical rule for a day of fun and shenanigans. He is mostly unreliable, a total scoundrel, but when the chips are down, he is always there for his kids. Royal is a reality unto himself, a man at once so unbelievable and yet so familiar that everyone, even his kids, always stand back a little in awe of him.

If there is a flaw with this movie, it is in its own eccentricity. Anderson and the Wilsons tell this story in much the same format as they did Rushmore, with witty asides and toss-away humor that fills the nook and cranny of every possible frame. They occasionally forget that the comedy is the vehicle of the message, and not the message itself. Dialogue gets lost when the Threesome get a little too carried away in gee-aren't-we-clever one-upmanship.

Consider a scene where Eli and Richie are discussing Richie's love for Margot in Eli's apartment. The camera cuts between the two, sitting on opposite couches facing each other. Above Richie is a massive oil painting of shirtless men in jeans wearing Native American facemasks. Above Eli is a painting of the same men, but on four-wheelers, with their hands raised up in fearsome claws (you just have to see it to laugh). As the camera cuts back and forth between the two during their exchanges, the oil paintings remain in frame. What did Eli and Richie say in this exchange? I have no idea. I was too busy trying to accept the reality of the paintings and giggling my damn fool head off.

And the style? Hinted at in Rushmore, the Threesome have gone full-tilt into a 70's sensibility, incorporating questionable (and distracting) costuming decisions with a lighting system that makes everything look like it was filmed at dusk. Why? No real reason. Again, the absurdist elements almost eclipse the story, to the detriment of the entire film.

The Royal Tenenbaums is a movie with heart, however, and it is a heart filled with both sadness and joy. Each of its characters is in some way broken, dooming themselves to repeat behaviors that neither help nor heal their souls. They are tragic, this family of geniuses, but are at some level all innocents, and for that we love them. Pity this movie didn't come out during Thanksgiving, as I'm sure most people can watch The Royal Tenenbaums and identify a few of their own relatives right up there on the movie screen.