With Arms Outstretched

The Darjeeling Limited, reviewed

To find comedy in a Wes Anderson film is to believe that the most satisfying humor is often found in the most tragic of places. His characters are often arrogant, neurotic, and selfish, their situations sad, desperate, and pathetic. At the heart of his films is failure: of a robbery, a relationship, a family, a career. But strip away the bravado and cynicism and you’ll find a very human yearning for companionship, for genuine acceptance of who these characters are, flaws and all. We laugh not because it’s funny, and on the surface it often isn’t, but rather because we know all too well the situation that is so bad, so ludicrous, that we can only laugh through the pain. And that’s exactly what a Wes Anderson film is: utterly ludicrous, and in meticulous detail no less.

The Darjeeling Limited is nothing if not ludicrous, from the matching, numbered, animal-printed (literally, little embroidered elephants and tigers and such) luggage to the daily printed, laminated itineraries, but it also has a real sadness, a true tragedy that isn’t funny, not even a little. What, or rather who, carries such a dramatic shift in tone and style is what always carries Anderson’s films: his steadfast corps of actors. Anderson regulars Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman have their usual, hilarious idiosyncrasies and the “new guy” Adrien Brody fills out the trio nicely, proving to have a thoughtful comic ability. Angelica Houston and Bill Murray both make small but memorable appearances and Kumar Pallana, now a cult favorite in Anderson films, is silent but very much present as a train passenger.


The story is centered around three brothers, Peter, Jack and Francis (played by Brody, Schwartzman, and Wilson respectively) who have come together for the first time in over a year to travel through India via train. Francis, whose head and face is wrapped in bandages from an alleged car accident, has coordinated the trip and micromanaged every detail, going so far as to decide what each brother will eat at each meal. Peter is the most normal, relatively speaking, though he has a tendency to steal trivial items from his brothers and dons their dead father’s sunglasses despite the prescription lenses, therefore they’re usually on his forehead instead of his face. Jack is the enlightened of the three; he’s been traversing the globe, writing short stories and encountering romantic trysts in Paris with the kind of woman who wears a perfume called “Voltaire #6.” Needless to say, they hate each other.

But hate is a strong word, and it’s not so much that they hate each other as it is that they hate the knowledge and experiences shared between them. One year prior, their father died in a car accident, their mother refused to show at the funeral, and they all went their separate ways to deal (or not) with the grief in their own way. Onboard the Darjeeling Limited, a kitschy yet beautifully detailed train in turquoise and gold, they hide things from each other, two always discussing something not for the third’s ears, but like petulant children they always tell the other. There is still much they do not share, though, secret pains that spring from the same source but manifest themselves differently; Francis is a control freak, Jack escapes into the arms of an Indian woman onboard, and Peter simply cries alone in the bathroom while reading Jack’s “fictional” short story about three brothers on the way to a funeral.

From all of this it seems The Darjeeling Limited isn’t much of a comedy, and to some extent that is true. The death of an Indian boy sobers the brothers as well as the movie and allows Anderson to behold the ethereal beauty of an Indian village mourning their loss. Grief permeates every scene, even as Jack breaks up a fight between Francis and Peter with Indian pepper-spray, the two locked in an embrace as they endure the pain together.


But we were warned from the beginning, weren’t we? The film makes an abrupt start as Bill Murray anxiously weaves through an Indian city by taxi. He can’t be bothered with paying the cab fare as he leaps out the door, rushes through the crowded train station, and attempts to catch his train as it slowly, but surely, departs. The frenetic pace gives way to slow motion and Murray looks like the athlete that will make the winning play, but alas, a new face emerges, passing Murray, and hops onboard. The new face is Brody, and as The Kinks sing the line, “I’ll leave the sun behind me,” the old man, and the old Anderson film, doesn’t make the train.

posted by Alison @ 11:25 PM