There’s a famous scene in the movie Contempt where director Fritz Lang grumpily derides Cinemascope, saying it’s “only good for snakes and funerals!”So it seems fitting that snakes and funerals should both play an important role in The Darjeeling Limited, the new film by Wes Anderson, one of the modern masters of the Cinemascope frame. Lang didn’t say anything about trains, but they’re also a perfect Cinemascope subject, and few trains have been filmed with the loving attention that Anderson lavishes on the one that provides a cramped temporary home for the three Whitman brothers during their trip across India—the first time they’ve spoken in over a year.
Jack (Jason Schwartzman) is the youngest, an author of transparently autobiographical short stories whose hangdog expression and droopy mustache don’t seem to hamper his ability to seduce women, including the train’s beautiful stewardess. Peter (Adrien Brody) is the middle child, still grieving the death of his father, who’s left his very pregnant wife back home to bond with his siblings. And Francis (Owen Wilson) is the control-freak oldest brother, his head still swaddled in bandages after a horrific car accident, who’s planned out the entire micromanaged voyage, complete with laminated daily itineraries full of precisely timed side trips to some of “the most spiritual places in India.”
The inability of these three overprivileged brothers to appreciate the beauty of their surroundings provides the film with much of its humour—they’re too busy guzzling painkillers and cough medicine and trying to sneak cigarettes without the stern chief steward catching them. When they visit their first shrine, they spend all their time squabbling over who gets to wear Francis’ belt to bother praying. (Small wonder that their mother—played beautifully by Anjelica Huston—decided to run off and join a convent of nuns in the Himalayas. If you had kids like these, who wouldn’t want to get as far away from them as possible?)
As far as I can tell, the critical and popular backlash against Wes Anderson began with The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou—especially that publicity photo of Anderson wearing some kind of expensive-looking tailored suit and an aviator scarf, sitting behind the controls of one of the undersea capsules that had been specially built for the movie. Suddenly, he no longer seemed like a lovable eccentric with an eye for detailed set design; now he was an effete megalomaniac bent on controlling every square inch of the camera frame. It was as if he’d become one of his own characters, a prisoner in his own dollhouse. What once seemed distinctive, quirky and eccentric now came off as heartless, emotionally remote, mannered beyond belief. Was this the only thing Wes Anderson wanted to make—more “Wes Anderson movies”?
And sure enough, the knock on The Darjeeling Limited is that it’s just more of the same—yet another dose of visually fussed-over Wes Anderson whimsy. Even if that were the case, I don’t understand that criticism—what if I like Wes Anderson’s visual style? What’s wrong with getting more of it in a brand-new setting? And I don’t think it’s true that Anderson is just treading water in The Darjeeling Limited either.
Sure, many of his signature tropes are on display here: slow-motion sequences set to British Invasion pop hits, plenty of flat tableaux, lots of those quick 90-degree horizontal swish pans he’s so fond of. But I think filming on location in India has loosened him up a little—his actors don’t feel like his personal dress-up dolls, pinned in position within the frame the way they often did in Zissou. There’s a nice balance between the meticulous and the messy in this movie—from the bustle of the Indian villages the Whitmans explore to the way the camera can never quite hold steady when it’s on the train.
Anderson’s soundtrack borrows a lot of music from old Satyajit Ray movies, and while The Darjeeling Limited has a much archer comic sensibility than Ray, it has the same humanism. There’s nothing in Ray’s work like the beautiful scene late in The Darjeeling Limited, set to the Rolling Stones’ “Play With Fire,” which revisits the film’s various minor characters and depicts them all as passengers in the same train even though they’re actually scattered all over Europe and Asia—but I think Ray would recognize a kindred impulse within it, a sense that everyone in the world is on the same voyage.
Indeed, the saddest character in this blissfully melancholy little movie is the businessman played by Bill Murray, who in the film’s opening sequence races frantically to catch the train as it pulls out of the station, but isn’t quite fast enough to climb on board. What could be sadder than missing a trip on The Darjeeling Limited?
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