‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ at 20: When Wes Anderson Imagined New York

The film’s vision of the city is at once entirely made up and very real seeming, both dated and contemporary. But the movie couldn’t outrun current events.

Wes Anderson’s sprawling comedy-drama “The Royal Tenenbaums,” released 20 years ago this month, tells the story of a family of famed child geniuses, the disappointments and neuroses that define their lives as adults and the estranged father whose (feigned) illness brings them back together, under one roof in Upper Manhattan. It’s Anderson’s only film to date shot entirely in and around New York City, his sole entry in the canon of Gotham cinema, which was so formative to his youth in the Southwest.

“I wanted to live in New York when I was young,” Anderson, a Houston native, confessed to The New York Daily News in 2012. “So many books and plays and movies that I love were set in New York. It really gave me an idea of the city before I had even moved here.”

But that wording — “an idea of the city” — is telling. Anderson wasn’t seeking the authenticity and verisimilitude of a native New Yorker (a Spike Lee or Martin Scorsese, for example); in fact, though “The Royal Tenenbaums” was shot on location, its settings are unrecognizable, and the places it name-checks leave Gothamites scratching their heads. The bulk of the action takes place in the shambling Tenenbaum home on “Archer Avenue,” though daughter Margot has “a private studio in Mockingbird Heights” and patriarch Royal has spent the past several decades at the “Lindbergh Palace Hotel.” A secondary character teaches at “Brooks College”; others travel via the “Green Line Bus” or the “22nd Avenue Express” train; mention is made of the “City Public Archives,” “Maddox Hill Cemetery,” “Little Tokyo,” “Kobe General Hospital,” “the Valenzuela Bridge” and, in a true feat of city-stretching ingenuity, “the 375th St. Y.”