The Darjeeling Limited
The Darjeeling Limited
Film review by: Witney Seibold
Kinda funny that the word “limited” is in the title, as director Wes Anderson seems to be constantly showing off the limits of his range. “The Darjeeling Limited” is heads and shoulders above Anderson’s forcefully weird “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” and Anderson does seem to be constantly improving in tecjhincal skill with each passing film (every one is a little les sloppy than the last), but, well a snarky headline in The Onion summed it up pretty well: “New Wes Anderson Film to Feature Quirkiness, Beautiful Art Direction, Father Issues.”
The film also displays a maddening dichotomy between guarded and obvious. The characters are all deadpan and wounded, but none of them ever seem to come clean (except in small ways). At the end of the film, we feel like we haven’t been taken too far away, emotionally, from the same people at the beginning of the film. If the point of the film was that people don’t change, that would be fine, but Anderson is obviously looking for a climax or a catharsis, and it’s frustrating how muted it can be.
At the same time, the film is loaded down with very, very obvious imagery. One of the three lead brothers has a face covered with scars and wounds. “I still need time to heal” he says. The three lead brothers all have emotional baggage left behind by the death of their father, represented by (get this) a bunch of heavy suitcases left behind by their father. And, most ham-handed of all, there is an interlude where the three brothers save children from drowning.
All if these images would play as self parody if Anderson stepped out of his brightly-colored sets and painful deadness for a moment, but he does not. He is not reaching for parody. He is trying for honesty.
The story: The three Whitman brothers have agreed to meet in India for an extended train ride on the titular express. The oldest, Francis (Owen Wilson), is the mastermind behind this trip, and insists on visiting “the most spiritual places” in India. His face is covered with bandages following a motorcycle accident. Peter (Adrien Brody) is running from a pregnant wife, and only confides in the young Jack (Jason Schwartzman, who co-wrote the screenplay). Jack himself is so obsessed with his ex-girlfriend that he still checks her phone messages with a stolen PIN. The brothers have not seen one another for a year following the funeral of their father, and the point of the trip is some family bonding. This family has never bonded before, though, so they’re in for a heck of a trip.
Along the way Jack has a flirtatious affair with one of the train’s stewardesses (Amara Karan), they buy copious amount of cheap prescription drugs, a snake, and pepper spray (Lord knows why), and try, in their upper-crust-ugly-America way to find spiritual peace. Francis eventually reveals that the trip is also a way to bond with their long-missing mother (Angelica Huston) who has moved to a nearby convent. There’s also a cameo by French director Barbet Schroeder.
There was a 13-minute short film made in conjunction with “The Darjeeling Limited” called “Hotel Chevalier,” which filled in a little bit of Jack’s past. I have not seen it, but it is available online. The most notable thing about this film, I have heard, is that one can look at Natalie Portman’s bare bottom. I want to say seeing the short may shed some light on the guarded accessibility and cryptic mannerism of the feature, but I doubt it. Doubtless it is just more of the same.
