The Darjeeling Limited
w. Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, d. Wes Anderson. The opening scenes of the movie proper of The Darjeeling Limited find Bill Murry, suited and dapper, in the back of a taxi cart whipping along the streets of an unnamed Indian town, dodging pedestrians, cyclists, rickshaws, other taxi carts, cows and other livestock in such a fury that would imply there are no street rules in India. The garb of the town's residents are bright and shocking against a backdrop of browns, umbers, siennas and clay and there's just enough differential to show more than just a sea of mud. I turned to my wife an queried if that would be her uncle, who surprisingly one day not too long ago decided to take a trip to India, a place, to even his own children's knowledge, he'd never expressed an interest in going to.
The end result of the mad dash through town was so that Murray might catch his train, and running along with his boarding pass and his luggage in hand he chases the train down the long platform, it's name painted on the back, The Darjeeling Limited, moving only slightly closer, the threat of running out of platform or the train picking up steam looming. Suddenly, sprinting past Murray is Adrien Brody's Peter, well groomed, striding long and lean, and providing a little smile as he passes the older gentleman, one of Wes Anderson's twee music choices playing over the scene, heading into a patented Anderson slow-motion swell as Peter boards the train, leaving Murray behind passing a meaningless (yet somehow noteworthy) glance at the man standing in front of the door, who passes an equally meaningless (yet somehow noteworthy) glance back.
The whole sequence is quintessentially Wes Anderson. The composure of the scenes, the timing of the edits, the close-ups of faces, the soundtrack, the sound effects, the angles (or lack thereof), the momentum, and the general goodwill all of this extends to the audience. It's humorous but it's not comedy, per se, but watching it, and being an admirer of Anderson's work, it immediately put a smile on my face, and welcomed me into the film.
That isn't to say that Anderson's techniques are flawless. The short film that precedes the main feature, "Act 1 of The Darjeeling Limited", features Jason Schwartzman's Jack, a mainstay at a French hotel, ordering dinner in his hotel-branded bathrobe. Upon hanging up the phone, it rings, and it's obvious it someone he doesn't want to talk to or see, a lover (or formerly so). He cleans up, both the room and himself, and makes an effort to arrange things for his unexpected and unwanted (but not unwelcome) guest. This turns out to be Natalie Portman, in an unnamed role. They talk meaningfully to one another, all out of any sense of context, but with enough emoting to imply there's tension and attraction, comfort and repulsion. The meaning of the sequence comes into play in the main act of the film, and elements of Peter's character cleverly play back with more resonance later, but this opening short feature is a little too heavy and tedious without enough meaning to keep the audience fully engaged. There's another of Anderson's patented slow-motion avec twee-music walks in this short, which seemed gratuitous and unecessary, and slowed down the pacing of the short to a desperate crawl. Thankfully the hyper-active opening sequence of the main act snaps a lulled audience out of the dreary gray of Paris and into sunny India.
Aboard the Darjeeling Limited, Peter greets his brothers, Jack and Francis, the latter played by Owen Wilson, who's sporting bandages around his head and all over his face. The assembly of distinguished Hollywood noses in the compact train compartment strikes me as brilliant and excessive, but the interaction between Francis, the eldest and his younger siblings establishes the trio firmly and quickly as familial without a doubt, and the strain between them equally unquestionable. There may not be outright quarreling, but their passive-aggressive attitudes towards each other implies that they haven't exactly been close as of late.
Anderson's camera has a love affair with the compact space of the train compartments and corridors, every space composed of lines creating and even smaller frame. It's a stimulating environment, and it's represented thematically throughout, as the boys walk into a market that's walled off on either side, or down a stretch of land where theres' tree's to their right and a rapidly moving stream to their left. Even when they exit the train, there's still a wall of hill in front of them, the train behind them... yet another corridor.
The train ride takes the obviously privileged siblings through India, where Francis has a schedule arranged for their every minute (via his "unseen" assistant Brendan) that is intended to take them on a spiritual journey, the end to be the surprise highlight. The purpose is to reconnect, (and Francis utters the words "Let's promise to..." at the beginning of far too many sentences to retain any believable relevance) considering the distance that has come between them since their father's death a year before and the detrimental impact it's had on each of their lives. It's meant to be healing, but it just begins to drive a bigger wedge between them, until their antics get them kicked off the train and they have a selfless experience which unites them in a sobering way.
There's a whimsy throughout the film and within the characters that makes this (and pretty much all of Anderson's movies) delightfully watchable. He's also so capable of extracting power out of this attraction, and there's a stretch here in which he just nails you to the characters, uniting the audience with their situation. The emotions that emerge are your own but projected upon the characters, and it's in part thanks to his effective slow-motion/twee-music combo. Here, what you feel, they feel, rather than the other way around. There's a equal beauty and vacantness to these scenes Anderson presents that enables this, and it's magic, the power of filmmaking.
While Darjeeling Limited isn't his best work (The Royal Tenenbaums still holds true) and it's not my favourite (I've such a soft spot for The Life Aquatic), this is a fitting and triumphant close to an unofficial trilogy of family-centered stories from the writer-director. His next work is a star-studded animated adaptation of Rold Dahl's The Fabulous Mr. Fox, a big-time departure from his usual fare, and I think once he heads out on that different path that these past three films will unite even further.
-4/5-