You never really expect realism from Wes Anderson. You expect something a little bit more. He’s the guy, after all, who set Jason Schwartzman loose with a room service cart full of bees in Rushmore, all set to the turgid, churning onslaught of The Who’s A Quick One (While He’s Away). He’s the one who rediscovered Bill Murray, long after the mug had been consigned to the ash heap of bad comedies. He’s the one who detected the dark side of Owen Wilson in The Royal Tenenbaums, long before the actor’s reported drug troubles and suicide attempt.
In The Darjeeling Limited, which played and fled Manila all within the space of a week, he brings together some of his staple players — Wilson, Schwartzman, Angelica Huston, even a throwaway cameo by Murray — and tosses Adrian Brody into the mix. What is supposed to be a movie about a spiritual journey aboard a train rolling through India actually reveals itself to be yet another stylistic exercise in family dysfunction.
And it’s also kinda entertaining.
Not as slapdash as The Life Aquatic, not the gem that Tenenbaums was, Darjeeling Limited mostly rides on the fraternal tensions between the three male leads and a great visual sense that makes India look like a wonderland.
You’ve got the Whitman brothers — Francis (Wilson), Peter (Brody) and Jack (Schwartzman) — aboard a cross-India train on a quest for enlightenment. Or so hopes Francis, who orchestrates the reunion after recovering from a near-fatal motorcycle crash. Francis is the control freak in the group; Peter is the gawky, overgrown kid afraid of becoming a father; and Jack is the short story writer and resident sleazy chick hound.
Naturally, it is the demise of one parent (and a search for the other one) that sets Anderson’s spiritual quest in motion. Adults in Wes Anderson movies never really grow up: they live in the shadow of parents who are gifted wiseasses, or siblings who try to take the reins too much. His characters seem to come from well-off families, but it’s a mystery where the money comes from — none of the kids ever seems to get the hang of being a “success,” precocious as they are. (Anderson must have absorbed a lot of J.D. Salinger’s Glass family saga as a child.)
While this does lead to a lot of quirkiness and an underlying melancholy in Wes Anderson movies, he also has a gift for the recurring banal detail (the search for a power adaptor in India, for instance); the way people irritate each other relentlessly with the things they say; and a fascination with constructing visual tableaux that stay rooted in the consciousness like handmade dioramas.
In fact, somewhere halfway into Darjeeling Limited, you start to realize the director is more interested in his elaborate design than in whatever story he has to tell. Characters don’t gain much depth, most of the exchanges are glib, and the spiritual symbolism is way too obvious (getting rid of life’s “baggage”).
But it’s the elaborately-staged shots that stand out here, not the character studies. Principally, these are the scenes set in a Hindu temple, the provincial funeral held after a child drowns (referencing The River by Jean Renoir and using music by Indian director/composer Satyavit Ray), and the inevitable wide pan shots of men running in slow motion set to the beat of ‘60s Brit Pop (here, it’s the Kinks’ “Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround” that does service; in Life Aquatic it was David Bowie’s Glam Rock phase).
Anderson doesn’t sugarcoat the grime and poverty of India, but his train cars are really something to look at (also look-worthy is the retro-kitsch travel luggage designed by Louis Vuitton for the film and the short feature with Natalie Portman, Hotel Chevalier, that serves as “Part 1” of Darjeeling).
There are comic moments: a loose cobra on the train, a lot of prescription medicine abuse, and some amorous bits with a train “stewardess” named Rita (big-eyed Amara Karan).
In truth, there’s nothing particularly new or groundbreaking here by Wes Anderson. It’s just kind of fun having his peculiar point of view around.
Possibly I enjoyed The Darjeeling Limited because I have two brothers myself (one older, one younger) and could relate to the psychic struggle between male siblings, the need (or desire) to reunite and to occasionally offer unsolicited advice. Then there are just those times you want to garrot each other to death with piano wire. Anderson has also understood, ever since his precocious debut (Bottle Rocket), the tendency within some siblings to view their family lives as epic — that is, to view them as ongoing experiments that often veer badly off-course, sometimes crash, and at the end of it, there is always the option of shrugging your shoulders and just walking away from the whole horrible wreckage.
That’s Wes Anderson’s idea of a family movie.