As with just about everything, it’s the soul of the thing
that matters. Watching Wes Anderson’s latest, it’s hard not to consider
The Darjeeling Limited to be the slightest of his films. At the
very least, it’s the loosest: With a scant wire frame of a plot,
writer/director Anderson and his two co-writers, Roman Coppola and
Jason Schwartzman, are content to let the plot’s details slip into a
blurry haze, focusing on the tone and the spirit of the film more than
its specifics. Of all Anderson’s films—Bottle Rocket,
Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with
Steve Zissou—the moody, witty The Darjeeling Limited is the one that’s most about the things happening out of focus in the
background or hovering on the edge of the frame.
That wire frame: Three estranged brothers (Adrien Brody,
Schwartzman, and Owen Wilson) board a train crawling across
India—Wilson’s character, in one of his many bursts of
enthusiastic vagueness, declares it a “spiritual journey.” Things get
more complex, yeah, but at its base, there it is: A blue train clanks
and chugs across the brown earth, making periodic stops at temples and
villages, and onboard and off, our dickish-but-loveable brothers are
joined by a contraband cobra and other fantastically quirky plot
devices—all of which they wrestle with while they openly admit
that they don’t trust each other and/or share bottles’ and bottles’
worth of sketchy Indian drugs. (If anybody knows where to get
“Narco-Cough,” hook me up.)
One’s reaction to the phrase above—”fantastically quirky plot
devices”—is as good of a test as any as to whether they’ll find
The Darjeeling Limited a charming, vivacious tone poem or a
redundant bit of too-cute showmanship. Anderson’s films have grown
increasingly farfetched and precious, and even the change of scenery to
a romanticized India doesn’t change the fact that Darjeeling is
yet another of his stories about children with daddy issues.
On a stronger note, other and less tired Wes Andersonisms—a
beautiful soundtrack, breathtakingly gorgeous cinematography, sharp and
bittersweet performances—are solidly in place, and while the film
occasionally exemplifies Anderson’s sometimes annoying tendency of
quirkiness for quirkiness’ sake, the more constant and important thing
is the film’s heart. Throughout all of The Darjeeling Limited‘s
rambling, there’s a core of earnestness, a sense that these characters
and their scant story genuinely matter. And even though we’ve seen a
lot of this before, we can’t help but be affected, if only because
Anderson himself clearly feels this so deeply.
