Families make a fascinating subject matter for a story. A family is a group of people from a bunch of different walks of life and age groups who are forced to spend a lot of time together because they all share the same bloodline. It’s sweet to see loving families getting along and supporting each other emotionally, but the best stories about families focus on a dysfunctional unit.
There can be elements of both tragedy and comedy in these stories as the families struggle to communicate and begrudgingly love one another. Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums is the gold standard, so here are 10 Tragicomic Family Sagas To Watch If You Like The Royal Tenenbaums.
The Squid and the Whale
The Squid and the Whale wasn’t Noah Baumbach’s first movie, but it was his first truly revelatory one. It’s an honest and poignant story about a family going through a divorce. At the heart of it is Jesse Eisenberg, in a star-making early-career turn, playing the teenage son torn between his warring parents. His brother has been compulsively masturbating in public, and his dad is trying to sleep with the girl he has a crush on, so his adolescent years aren’t going so well. Baumbach wrings every ounce of humor, heart, humiliation, and outright tragedy from these characters that he can.
August: Osage County
Adapted from the play of the same name that has become synonymous with stories about dysfunctional families (it’s The Royal Tenenbaums of the theater world), the movie August: Osage County’s primary selling point was its cast of A-list actors. The movie’s ensemble has a lucrative combination of high-profile talent including Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Abigail Breslin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Juliette Lewis, and Chris Cooper.
By closely following the play—with some tweaks, here and there, as is the nature of adaptation —and casting fantastic actors to play richly drawn characters, the movie brought the story of this crazy family to the big screen in spectacular fashion.
Spanglish
Written and directed by Simpsons co-developer James L. Brooks, Spanglish is a dramedy about differing social classes and the language barrier. In one of his rare, but powerful dramatic performances, Adam Sandler plays a successful chef with a pretty miserable home life.
He finds a kindred spirit in his housekeeper—despite the fact that Spanish is her first language, and he can’t speak it (hence the awkward portmanteau of the title)—who is having problems with her own personal life. It’s a shame that the movie was a box office failure, because it’s a really sweet story about two families.
Boyhood
Shot over the course of 12 years as the lead actor aged in real time, Boyhood charts the life of Mason Evans, from his childhood right until he goes off to college. Richard Linklater started shooting the movie in 2002 without a complete script, with decade-long commitments from a couple of child actors and, playing their parents, Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette (who each did incredible things with the 12-year period they were given to live with their characters). The movie doesn’t have a traditional three-act structure; it’s more a series of loosely connected vignettes about an unconventional family unit, but that works brilliantly.
Hannah and Her Sisters
Although revelations about Woody Allen’s personal life have made it difficult to appreciate his films, there’s some incredible acting in display in Hannah and Her Sisters. Allen has an on-screen role, but he’s not the lead. The focus of the story is instead on the characters played by Barbara Hershey, Carrie Fisher, Mia Farrow, Dianne Wiest (who won an Oscar), and Michael Caine (who also won an Oscar), each embodying their roles and giving stellar performances.
Like most of Allen’s movies, Hannah and Her Sisters is about human relationships, primarily infidelity and what leads people to do it and the effects it has.
The Darjeeling Limited
Also helmed by The Royal Tenenbaums’ Wes Anderson, The Darjeeling Limited tells the story of three brothers taking a long train journey across India. Since they spend most of their time together in an enclosed space, the brothers are forced to confront their issues.
The Darjeeling Limited is perhaps Anderson’s most underrated film. Discussions of his best work usually involve Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel, while this one falls by the wayside, but the actors (Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, and Adrien Brody—all Anderson regulars) have incredible chemistry, the dialogue rings true as communication between brothers, and the cinematography capturing Indian landscapes is beautiful.
American Beauty
Sam Mendes’ American Beauty is a harrowingly accurate satire of married life, family life, and suburban life. Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening star as Lester and Carolyn Burnham, respectively, who each go through a midlife crisis. Lester quits his job and gets hired at a fast-food restaurant and starts lifting weights, while Carolyn starts having an affair.
Whether the family is passive-aggressively arguing about what music to play over dinner or Lester is rolling his eyes at how much Carolyn cares about a wine stain on the couch, American Beauty takes a painful look at the everyday struggles of a materialistic American family.
Nebraska
Alexander Payne is no stranger to road movies, having helmed Sideways, a cinematic trip through wine country following a wild bachelor party, but Nebraska was a totally different kind of movie. For starters, it was shot in black-and-white. But, going further than that, it’s a movie about humanity’s capacity for good, whereas Sideways was about humanity’s capacity for evil and deceit.
Nebraska stars Bruce Dern as a bitter father who is told he’s won a contest and can collect a prize in the titular U.S. state. Despite everyone telling him it’s a scam, he’s determined to go, even if he has to walk hundreds of miles along the highway. So, his son, played by Will Forte, drives him, and their relationship is deconstructed and ultimately strengthened along the way.
Little Miss Sunshine
A young Abigail Breslin made her name in this comedy-drama about a family driving across the U.S. in a beaten-down van to get the youngest kid to a child beauty pageant. But the whole cast is incredible. Toni Collette and Greg Kinnear brilliantly play a pair of high-maintenance parents who are mainly staying together for their kids. A young Paul Dano is a revelation as Breslin’s brooding older brother. Steve Carell is heartbreaking in an unusually dramatic performance as the uncle, a suicidal academic, and Alan Arkin is typically hysterical as the grumpy grandfather who goes along for the ride.
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
Praised as the first Netflix original movie to have a chance at Oscar glory, Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) tells the heartbreaking story of a family with deep-rooted issues. Dustin Hoffman stars as the patriarch of the family, who had Adam Sandler with his first wife and then disregarded him when he had Ben Stiller with his second wife.
Sandler and Stiller play the two brothers and their strained relationship with both hilarity and heartache. The movie’s novelistic structure, built like a short story collection where all the stories revolve around the same group of characters, makes it stand out.
