If you are a Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums) fan, then you will like this movie. If you are indifferent to Anderson, you will wonder why this is not as good as The Royal Tenenbaums.
The Darjeeling Limited tells the story of three brothers meeting for the first time since the death of their father one year ago. Francis, Jack, and Peter Whitman (played by Owen Wilson, Jason Shwartzman, and Adrien Brody) go on a spiritual journey through India to bond and work out their problems. The fun of this movie is watching their failed attempts to reconnect. Despite a laminated travel schedule provided by Francis, they manage to get off track pretty quickly due to a stolen shoe, an escaped poisonous snake, and cough medicine addictions.
The Darjeeling Limited, as a train, is a beautiful device. It is Indian culture concentrated into a few small compartments. You can almost smell the “spicy air” as Brody says. It also helps that Anderson chose to shoot the train in motion. That means the camera had to be very close to the action, and almost always inside the cramped train. It makes you feel like you are squished inside with them.
The performances are wonderful. They are believably brothers, managing to combine a sense of distrust for each other with a sense of familiarity. Notably, there are several moments when one brother will confide a secret in another and urge him not to tell the third. The secret is spilled to the third almost immediately.
The strength of this movie is also its weakness: the randomness of events. It might feel unnatural that so many odd things can happen on/around this one train. However, this is not so unnatural when compared to other road movies. Typically, the odd events are instigated by the brothers themselves, so if you can believe in them, the events will not feel as random.
What is more difficult to get around is the lack of importance these events have. From the beginning, all we understand is that they are, essentially, on vacation together. And then some stuff happens. It is not until the end of the movie that we get a full picture of these men, how rocked they were by their father’s death, and how they are trying to build new meaning back into their lives. Personally, I think it is worth the wait.
Overall, it is a really fun movie. It does not take itself too seriously and neither should you.
Popularity: 23% [?]
Leave a Reply