This film reminds me of the windowsill above the sink in my mother's kitchen. She keeps strange things there: shells, chestnuts, a small voodoo doll (me) inside a jar of salt. There's usually a changing array of newspaper clippings, quotes from poems, old photographs. The windowsill is a shrine.
Leaving "The Darjeeling Limited," I was pleased, but bemused. I felt like I just didn't get the joke. The tale of three brothers traveling through India made no sense until I thought about the insanity of my mother and her two sisters: families just don't make sense, do they? This is why families make perfect fodder for director Wes Anderson's idiosyncratic aesthetic; he gets away with it because a family is a self-contained universe, which we accept without explanation.
Leaving the theater for the streets of Hanover was confusing in another way: I'd forgotten that the real world isn't infused with an amber glow, that peacock colors don't come and go -- just cars, and the October cold.
Wes Anderson builds his film like a kitschy shrine, full of recurring eccentricities, all imaginatively and impeccably chosen. It's as if the Mad Hatter threw a tea party in an Anthropologie catalogue, and only cute boys with bad noses were invited.
In this case, the bad-nosed Whitman brothers, constantly bad-mouthing each other, are played by Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman (who had a hand in writing the film, alongside Anderson and Roman Coppola). The tea party takes place on the Darjeeling Limited, a romantic train treading slowly through India. The brothers have been brought back together by their domineering eldest, Francis (Wilson), after nearly a year of estrangement, to set forth on a spiritual quest to revive their fraternal bonds and to retrieve their mother (played by Anjelica Huston) who has run off into the foothills of the Himalayas and become a wild tiger-fighting nun.
Their father is dead, hit by a taxi. This is the real problem, and maybe the only decipherable (laughably so) motif in the film is dedicated to making this obvious: the brothers all carry multiple pieces of their father's heirloom baggage. If only everyone's emotional baggage could take the form of Marc-Jacobs-for-Louis-Vuitton critter-adorned luggage. Wouldn't that be nice?
Maybe that's my issue: the amber glow, all the slow motion, critter luggage and everything that gives this movie its off-kilter character is so essentially other-worldly. The film is slightly off-putting in its singularity in aesthetic focus. I can't trust it. It's too cute. At the same time, though, I'm enchanted. I want badly to believe this is a beautiful, bittersweet story of a family's spiritual redemption.
And generally I get what I want. Why not give up the nitpicking and enjoy this vision that Anderson has created? Maybe the meat of "meaning" can be butchered out of the film; maybe it's just the mundane multiplied by the power of beauty. And it's a movie, after all: there's nowhere better for dysfunction to become funny, for sadness to turn sanguine.
I almost forgot: amid the aesthetics and accessories, there are actors. They do fine. I can't see Wilson as anything but suicidal old Owen, but that's fine. Brody as Peter is the tallest, lankiest beaten puppy I've ever seen. Also fine. Schwartzman as the lone wolf Jack is perhaps better than the bottom-line fine, though this may be because his turn in "The Hotel Chevalier" -- a short film which prefaces the feature, and introduces his character -- gives him an easy leg up.
"The Hotel Chevalier" epitomizes Anderson at his best. Jack's hotel room in Paris is adorned with fetish-ized items, which are scanned quickly. One of the better moments from the end of the film echoes this item-scanning; the strange shot pans through not the train cars, really, but what I imagine as the small compartments of this whole crazed shrine: Jack's girlfriend (Natalie Portman) with her perfume bottle, Peter's pregnant wife and her proliferation of ugly clay pots, Bill Murray reprising his cameo as an awk rando, a man-eating tiger snarling in the night. I like what I'm seeing. I'm just not seeing meaning.
