"Wes Anderson and The Darjeeling Limited: A Trip to India, A Trip to Parable"
(November 2007)
Online Copy

It’s delightful disaffection. The joy of exquisite failure and earnest effort: Dignan’s life plans in Bottle Rocket, Max’s aquarium in Rushmore, Zissou’s hunt for the jaguar shark in Life Aquatic. Now it’s a tranquilized train ride across India in Wes Anderson’s fifth film, The Darjeeling Limited.

Bereaved by their father and separated by a yearlong silence, three brothers – Francis, Peter, and Jack (Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, and Adrien Brody) – converge for a rail journey through India. Francis insists it will be a time to “say yes to everything,” as they drop painkillers into their cocktails and fret over each other. They are destined to find their mother (Anjelica Huston) who has been living in a Himalayan convent.

The brothers bear baggage. They carry custom-made Louis Vuitton luggage, decorated with nature designs by Anderson’s brother. And they carry with them abandoned relationships and reckless mistakes. Francis is bandaged from crashing his motorcycle. Peter listens to his ex-girlfriend’s voice mail. Jack’s girlfriend is eight months pregnant.

They bring this to the train and through India – to the markets and the temples, through the flat, dry country, until they are kicked off and left in the desert. The new trip begins here, as they come across a village and a death, and the past of the death of their father, and their mother in the mountains.

Darjeeling is another work of Anderson finery, to be carefully mounted and labeled next to its predecessors. From gray Texas suburbs, to a New York mansion, to the blue ocean, and to India, Anderson’s scope has expanded, but his aesthetics are still a sartorial rainbow, his narration still like a neurotic, modern fairytale. The train carriages, the country villages, the robes and the turbans, are swaths of electric color. The well-dressed brothers glide through the slow-mo tracking shots.

Anderson even one-ups his prop concoction. Darjeeling is preceded by a short, Hotel Chevalier, which depicts an encounter of Peter and his ex-girlfriend (Natalie Portman) in Paris. He turns the tryst into a working short story within the film, reading excerpts to his brothers.

As an auteur, Anderson’s direction is unmistakable – with the futura font, the classic rock, the ornate props, the Wilson brothers and the recurring extras like Kumar Pallana or Seymour Cassel. And, more than anything, there’s the quirk: the eccentric, intelligent characters, stylish and artful in their fragile selfishness and overambitious projects.

Michael Hirschorn, in the September Atlantic Monthly, scoffs at quirk as a wider symptom of artists like Anderson, Dave Eggers, and the NPR program This American Life. It’s a petty, safe, non-conformance: the weird little detail, the goofy medical condition, the charming neurosis. He says it becomes an end in itself, no longer just part of the narration, but the whole inscrutable story.

However, this quirk is nothing new, just look at Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, at the matching suits, the anarchist spelling errors, the slideshow flashbacks, the café table Jules wants to purchase after sketching a face on it. But Truffaut could shift from those moments on to suicide, betrayal, and world war. The props and documents, the eccentric details, weren’t a fetish but a proof of a life of a character.

The quirk of Anderson helps him assemble an entire little cinematic world, a diorama of neat miniatures, with a storybook narrative to accompany its characters and their outfits, and some vibraphone, harpsichord, or sitar, and curtains, chapter headings, and accompanying illustrations.

Darjeeling’s little world is Anderson’s most abstracted yet, here an Indian expanse marked with stations of temptation and salvation, albeit for anesthetized brothers carrying laminated itineraries and an iPod stereo to accompany their holy redemption.

By the end of the film – and after a spectacular dolly shot passing through each of its carriages – the train transforms into Anderson’s most spiritual gesture. Darjeeling is more sincere than the saturated pastiche of Life Aquatic or the prodigal glee of Royal Tenenbaums. It’s caustic and sedated, but it’s Anderson telling a parable – of brothers on a train, abandoned by their parents, taking a trip through a distant place.


©2009 Tim Peters/All rights reserved