Meet the Tenenbaums, a textbook dysfunctional family Lawyer Royal (Gene Hackman) and his devoted wife Etheline (Anjelica Huston) have three geniuses for children: sons Chas (Ben Stiller), a financial whiz kid, and Richie (Luke Wilson), a tennis prodigy, and daughter Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), a writer, whom Royal never hesitates to remind is adopted. Enjoying far more success in law than fatherhood, Royal ignores his kids when he's not insulting them, cheats on his wife, and finally one day packs up and heads out altogether. Twenty years later, broke and feigning illness, Royal returns home hoping he can pick up where he left off, but instead he finds only the sad fallout brought by his selfish ways. Chas, a widower, is a rich-but-neurotic businessman who inflicts his own anal-retentive hang-ups on his two sons; Margot, a struggling playwright, can't stay faithful to her aging psychologist husband (Bill Murray); and Richie is a failed tennis pro whose legendary meltdown at the U.S. Open was caused by his secret love for Margot. Meanwhile, the family accountant (Danny Glover) has been wooing Etheline, now a prosperous archaeologist, and Richie's faithful childhood friend Eli (Owen Wilson, also co-writer) is now a successful novelist with a nasty drug habit.