Bodhi Rocket

In The Darjeeling Limited Wes Anderson takes a spiritual turn

By D.K. Holm

The Darjeeling Limited is Wes Anderson’s best film since Rushmore. Unfortunately, I fear that this wonderful film is going to be blindsided by the critics, who may find it slight, thin, and too whimsical for its own good. I, however, am drawing a line in the sand. If you don’t like The Darjeeling Limited, then you don’t like movies.
 
Here’s why. On the surface, Anderson’s tale—concerning the wry, gentle adventures of three brothers (brought together by the eldest, who is on a spiritual quest in India)—can indeed seem like a wisp of a short story stretched like taffy into full-feature length. However, Anderson needs all that extra screen time in order to do the things he wants to do, which is to examine a family in extreme dysfunction, and to deploy his camera in ostentatious ways that actually advance our understanding of his characters. If you sit there unmoved by Anderson’s revelatory lateral tracking shots, then ultimately the movies aren’t really your bag: try novels or plays instead.
 
The three brothers are Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody), and Jack (Jason Schwartzman). Francis (the one on the spiritual quest) is some kind of millionaire whose personal assistant hides in another car of the Darjeeling Limited and prepares the next day’s itinerary. The film opens with Peter arriving and just managing to leap onto the train as it pulls away. He meets up with his brother Jack in another compartment, and Francis surprises them by arriving with his head bandaged as a result of a severe car accident. Francis’s trip in fact seems to be a result of his near-death experience, but he also wants to pull his family back together after a year’s separation, or to put it another way, since the death of their beloved father, who died in Peter’s arms after being hit by a cab, and whose funeral they almost missed. It turns out, however, that Francis also has a hidden agendum for his brothers, which he hopes will bring “closure” to their familial troubles.
 
I get the impression that Anderson, contrary to common art world practices, writes stories about other people rather than just about himself. Among many muses are the Wilson Brothers, whom he has known since college, and who seem to be at least partial inspiration for Bottle Rocket and Darjeeling, while a friend named Brian Tenenbaum, whose credit appears in almost all of Anderson’s movies, lent his name to Anderson’s third feature, The Royal Tenenbaums. We get a hint of this through the character of Jack, an aspiring short story writer who insists that all his characters and scenes are “fictional,” yet are drawn, as we can plainly see, from life. In fact, in one of the film’s most inspired and subtle moments, the narrative “stops” and shows us the real-life incident that inspired the short story he is seen passing around between his brothers.
 
Perhaps what the critics will miss is the consistency this film has with the best of Anderson’s previous work, Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, and parts of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic. But Anderson’s films are easy enough to master, as they all revolved around a short list of themes and images:
 
Breakdowns The Anthony Adams character in Bottle Rocket (played by Owen Wilson) is just released from an institution after suffering a breakdown as the film begins, and in Darjeeling we soon learn that Francis (again, Wilson) actually suffered something more than just an auto accident. Herman Blume (Bill Murray) in Rushmore has something of a breakdown, as does Richie Tenenbaum (Luke Wilson), who sleeps in a tent in the Tenenbaum mansion.
 
Heroes with Artistic Aspirations Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman, in Rushmore) is the most obvious example of this, but each of Anderson’s films features an aspirant artist figure, including Darjeeling’s baby brother Jack, whose short stories are transcriptions of the dialogue and goings-on of those around him.
 
Estranged Parents There are no happily married parental figures in Anderson’s films, yet that doesn’t prevent his younger characters from chasing love, impossible as it may seem (see below).
 
Essentially Unrequited Love Most American movies are about love in one way or another, either because of the director’s inclinations or because of cynical commercial demands. In any case, so are Anderson’s films, and he has a knack for portraying the most delicate of obsessions.
 
Ethnic Organizers A recurrent character in the films is the near silent, quietly efficient Jeeves-like personal assistant, usually from India. Possibly because Francis is in a “foreign” country, he must therefore have the whitest of white assistants, the hairless Brendan (Wallace Wolodarsky) who suffers from alopecia.
 
The I Vitelloni Shot Anderson has a number of standard shot styles that he employs from film to film, but I’ll confine myself to just one here, a shot inspired by a montage at the end of Fellini’s 1953 film about a group of small town friends. The montage shows one of the group breaking away, and as his train toots off into the distance at night, he sees in his mind all of his friends sleeping in their various states of happiness. The Life Aquatic’s ship was just a great big excuse for a tracking shot creating an in-camera montage. In Darjeeling, at a crucial climactic juncture, Anderson populates the compartments of his train with all the people around the world waiting for the brothers to return, and even some minor characters only seen passing through, like Bill Murray, and then the camera tracks past them in spy mode.
 
In a sense, Darjeeling is the film Anderson has been building up to since Rushmore but from which he was diverted by his association with fellow director Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming, The Squid and the Whale). Anderson, who used to write his scripts with Owen Wilson, started collaborating with Baumbach, and the tone changed, the way Steven Spielberg’s movies grew harsher and colder when Janusz Kaminski started shooting them. To Anderson, Baumbach must have seemed like his real-life Max Fischer, the main character in Rushmore, a writer and director in his own right who is aggressive enough, as Fischer was in his world, to carve out a career. He must have become another muse, and the stories of their two films together are probably more him than Anderson. Prior to working with Baumbach, Asian Indian figures appeared in two of Anderson’s earlier films, but in Darjeeling take a much larger pride of place: the main characters are now in their world, instead of the other way around. Darjeeling, which Anderson wrote in collaboration with Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman (who are cousins and Hollywood royalty), feels much more back on track, more consistent with his first two films.
 
What’s wonderful about the film is how the family dynamic is unveiled slowly and patiently, waiting for the viewer to discover it all. For example, it’s enlightening to note the similarities between Francis and their mother, and amusing to see how Francis decries “factionalism” among the brothers while fostering it himself. Darjeeling does something that most mainstream movies don’t bother with; that is, taking the time to let us get to know the characters in depth.