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10/29/07
by Scott Cupper
Francis…………………..Owen Wilson
Peter……………………..Adrien Brody
Jack………………………Jason Schwartzman
Brendan………………….Wallace Wolodarsky
Rita………………………Amara Karan
Alice……………………..Camilla Rutherford
Patricia…………………..Anjelica Huston
The Businessman..……… Bill Murray
Rated R
Runtime: 1 hr. 31 min.
There are a lot of people who love Wes Anderson. I appreciate that he has a distinct style, but I feel the praise he receives from some is a little much. I like Rushmore a lot. That was released in 1998. Now here’s The Darjeeling Limited nearly 10 years later. Its camerawork is even more self-indulgent, the acting even more mannered, and the characters are still trying to grow up. I expect filmmakers to mature but I feel that Wes Anderson might actually be regressing.
The Darjeeling Limited of the title is a train in India. Francis (Owen Wilson) has invited his brothers to join him on the train. They haven’t seen each other or spoken in a while. When Peter (Adrien Brody) arrives, he asks Francis what happened to his face. Indeed. Francis looks like an elephant that got his ears and nose done, bandages wrapped around his head. He was involved in a motorcycle accident and landed face first.
This experience was the impetus for the journey. I mentioned that they haven’t seen each other in a while, since their father’s funeral a year ago to be exact. Which they nearly missed. And their mother didn’t attend. Because she’s disappeared. As expected for a Wes Anderson movie, issues abound. But this trip is going to bring them together. At least, this is Francis’s hope and he’s going to do everything in his power to make sure it happens including dictating rules for them like saying yes to everything, no matter what and having Brendan (Wallace Wolodarsky) onboard making laminated itineraries.
Peter is skeptical, but we learn that’s pretty much par for the course. He’s been in a long-term relationship with Alice (Camilla Rutherford) and is going to have a child with her but just isn’t sure about it. Why? Couldn’t say. The youngest, Jack (Jason Schwartzman), is at the whim of the others and the world. Sex with the stewardess presents itself, and he obliges. But he hacks into this ex-girlfriend’s voicemail whenever a phone presents itself.
Francis has plotted a course visiting as many holy places as possible. I will credit Wes Anderson with making India a character. He and his co-writers Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman toured India beforehand and the research is evident.
The movie is at odds against itself. One night, the brothers have a heart-to-heart-to-heart around a campfire. The moment inspires them to participate in a spiritual ceremony that Francis learned about. They all go to different corners of the screen and come back and find that only Francis did it correctly. It’s an amusing moment, but one that deflates the emotion that came before. This type of humor only works when the characters are laughing, too. Not just us.
This is indicative of the movie as a whole. Wes Anderson’s style has become so pervasive that it is what the movie is about. Every moment of pathos is undercut like this with humor or exaggerated color or a too-symmetrical shot. The movie is as emotionally stunted as the characters. Mr. Anderson has his actors be so unaffected by anything we’re not really sure when anything happens. Maybe that’s why when there finally is enlightenment, we are informed that it has happened with slow motion and a hip soundtrack blaring. Catharsis replaced with Hollywood magic.
I don’t know. There’s a lot about the movie that may reveal itself on multiple viewings. The movie is rife with symbolism; the most obvious is the father’s luggage that they cart through India. And I’m sure there are plenty of Wes Anderson apologists who would be ready and more than willing to explain it to me. How having the movie avoid emotion like the characters creates a subjective experience. But I couldn’t help feel that Wes Anderson and his actors like these characters and wanted me to like them, too. And if the movie fails at that, well, I’m not on board.
Note: The weekend after I saw The Darjeeling Limited, the short film Hotel Chevalier, which acts as a prologue, was being run before the film. That is why I made no mention of it here.
Monday, October 29, 2007
The Darjeeling Limited
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2 comments:
It's funny... All of your points are perfectly valid and I pretty much agree with all of them... But I still really liked it a lot.
When I go to see a Wes Anderson movie I know exactly what I'm in for, and I don't really expect anything more than what I've seen from him previously. I suppose technically that's a bad thing, but it really never takes away from my enjoyment. Wes Anderson movies are ornate pop-up books - they're awfully pretty to look at and the humor (for me anyway) mostly comes from how simple and childlike it all is (The skull and crossbones on the box that held the poisonous snake seriously cracked me up.). The characters sometimes seem to be pop-ups as well, made of cardboard - they’re all comprised almost entirely of traits and quirks - but it's really interesting to me how someone can say their lines without an emotion on their face or in their voice, say something “honest” that you know most directors would encourage an actor to milk the hell out of, that somehow, for me, anyway – still comes across as touching and sad and speaking volumes about where that character is at that exact moment. I'm thinking specifically of Jason Schwartzman with a deceptively blank face propositioning the stewardess (after they've already had sex) with a kind of breathless desperation that isn't portrayed at all and yet is somehow still there. It’s in the eyes not the eyebrows, in the pacing of the speech and not the mouth. It's so stylized that it makes me wonder how much of the performances are audience projection if that makes any sense... Which is interesting in and of itself to me.
I also don't mind that you don't really know why the characters do the things they do, or really, who they are, but there are pieces there that can be put together. For instance, Peter. No, it's never explained why he's so unsure about his relationship with his wife. All he really says about their relationship and being a husband is that he always assumed he’d get a divorce eventually and now with a kid involved… that’s not really a considerable option (at least that’s what’s implied, I think). Having a kid makes it real, makes your adulthood a fact (marriage being something you can get out of and be done with any time you like unfortunately), and he’s struggling with that, with how to be a father (and isn’t that kind of a universal thing for most new dads? It’s right there in Juno too – the struggle to let go of your own childhood now that you have to guide someone through theirs). He’s putting on the “dad” sunglasses, he’s holding onto the “dad” keys. He’s trying, and what happens? His “kid” dies in the river. And then you see him holding a baby in the village. You don’t see the moment when he accepts he’s going to be a father and I personally didn’t need to – I just knew he got there because he takes out a tiny little shirt which contrasts for me pretty sharply with what he’s bought previously – a poisonous snake – something a young boy would buy for himself because it’s cool to have a poisonous snake.
The death of the father, the family they come from, effects each of these characters, and in the film they are constructed as characters entirely from how each of them deal with these two things – Peter, shies away from becoming a father himself, tries to be the kid playing dress up because childhood is comparatively safe (you’ll notice he’s the most juvenile and childlike of the three), Jack is obsessed with his ex who is a stand in for his absent mother (the head cock with the music box, how AH and NP both approached the music box, was a nice touch I thought), and Frances, who asks plainly (and then quickly avoids hearing the answer) “did I raise us?” tries to be his father by trying to kill himself and insteads becomes his mother which is brought to light with AH’s scene. You find out he’s been mimicking her behaviour all along and it occurs to us with the flashback scene that that’s not who he was at all before. Beyond each of these “reactions” to a family death you have no idea really who they are. I don’t think they know either.
What does all of this say? I don’t know yet I haven’t really thought about it enough. Was my life enriched? Not really, no. Did I love it the way I loved The Royal Tenenbaums? No. Was I into it all the way through? Did I enjoy the performances? Did I love the scenery and the train itself? Yes, Yes, Yes.
As for using the soundtrack to signify “big moments”… It’s a part of the package. I expect it and I like it, and if I don’t get it? I’m a little disappointed. “Here is the part where we have an awesome song playing over our characters moving forward in slow motion”. I don’t have a problem when he does this, although the fact that he did it *three* times niggled a bit. But now that I’m thinking about it… he’s too meticulous to not have that mean something. Three Brothers. Three songs by a band with a notoriously strained fraternal relationship. “This Time Tomorrow”. “Strangers”. “Powerman”. There’s something there. I’ll look for it next time I watch.
Funnily enough I *hated* Life Aquatic for all the reasons you didn’t like Darjeeling. I really have to watch that one again to see why it doesn’t bother me here…
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