Wes Anderson (2007)

The Darjeeling Limited is an Indian railway train and three brothers – Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman) – travel on it.  It’s the first time the Whitman brothers have met since their father’s funeral; they’re on a journey, so Francis says, to spiritual enlightenment and to track down their mother (Anjelica Huston), who’s decided that she prefers living in the foothills of the Himalayas to America.   Wes Anderson explained in the short interview that preceded the Film 4 showing of the film in May this year (when Moonrise Kingdom arrived in cinemas) why he had wanted to make a movie about India; he mentioned his admiration for Satyajit Ray, Jean Renoir’s The River, and Louis Malle’s India documentaries.  The locations certainly help Anderson to create some characteristically lovely colour schemes – the turquoise and gold interiors of the eponymous train are vibrant, the sunlight in the world outside is ravishing.  Yet India indoors and outdoors looks like a piece of design, the usual effect of Anderson’s meticulous visual arrangements.

Also as usual with Anderson, I can’t think of much to say about The Darjeeling Limited.  Looking through my notes on his other movies, the one on Fantastic Mr Fox, by far my favourite, is by some way the longest.  Darjeeling, like Moonrise Kingdom, has plenty of good people in the cast but the performances aren’t so much orchestrated as uniform – the droll dryness of all three brothers is an Anderson rather than a Whitman family characteristic and it muffles the actors’ individuality.  It says a lot for how likeable Owen Wilson is that he’s even tolerable as the controlling Francis; his head is heavily bandaged for most of the movie (Francis intentionally drove his car into the side of a hill) but Wilson’s wit occasionally penetrates the designer crepe.  Peter is the Whitman brother who’s most conspicuously in mourning for their father.  Adrien Brody’s natural humour and melancholy might seem to make him ideal for the role but he uses his face here as a comic mask and the result isn’t either expressive or funny.   Schwartzman, who co-wrote the screenplay with Anderson and Roman Coppola, gives the most effective performance of the three leads, even if this is partly because you expect less of him.  One of the strongest moments in the whole movie comes when Jack, with his head outside the train window to smoke a cigarette, locks eyes with the beautiful stewardess (Amara Karan) who’s getting a breath of fresh air for the same purpose.

The bonding of the Anderson clan is stronger than either blood ties or sexual attraction between the characters in The Darjeeling Limited.   Wilson and Schwartzman are more believable as members of the same family than is Brody, who’s making his debut in an Anderson film; Anjelica Huston as the distanced matriarch is completely on the director’s wavelength, as is Bill Murray in a non-speaking cameo as another train passenger.  For once in an Anderson film, no dogs come to a bad end; this time it’s a young Indian boy.  When Peter fails to save him from drowning, Adrien Brody’s grief and shame at his failure supply for a few minutes an urgency that’s lacking everywhere else in the film.  The other references to death and attempted suicide are weightless.  I can’t help thinking there’s something wrong when a director is able to trigger emotional truth in his actors and move his audience only when a child or a harmless animal dies.

27 September 2012