I hated The Royal Tenenbaums the first time I saw it. I loved Wes Anderson’s previous film, 1998’s Rushmore, and was expecting more of the same. But compared to Rushmore’s private school hijinks, The Royal Tenenbaums’ tale of a dysfunctional family of geniuses is drier than the Sahara — and I couldn’t stand it.

But then I saw it a second time, perhaps a bit more prepared, and I was wholly taken in by this story of a broken family, the man who broke it, and his sorry attempts to try and put things back together. As with all Anderson films, The Royal Tenenbaums is an ensemble picture, with Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Danny Glover, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, and more. Everyone’s firing on all cylinders, but it’s Hackman who runs away with the film as the would-be patriarch, a low-down, no-good son of a bitch you just can’t help but love.

It’s a well-known fact that Anderson’s films are all stylized to within an inch of their lives, and that’s no less the case with The Royal Tenenbaums. But of all his films, this one does the best job of keeping its characters deeply human, and not merely caricatures spouting arch dialog in perfectly posed playsets.