The Darjeeling Limited: A Review

There aren’t many directors active today that inspire stronger emotions than Wes Anderson. In a true auteur-styled career, with writer-director credits for 5 feature-length films in 12 years, he has fashioned a unique visual and story-telling style. Some love it, some hate it. I’m one of the few that often finds myself somewhere in between, wanting to like it, but realizing that my own mood swings may keep me from doing so.

In The Darjeeling Limited, Wes extends this style but also themes that have been explored in his previous film, mainly his interest in the theme of family. In this venture, we begin with a fascinating opening shot, showing Bill Murray and Adrien Brody running to catch up with a train. Murray is one of Anderson’s favorite actors, and so fans of his films almost expect Murray to board the train. But he doesn’t, and as Brody hops aboard, it’s as if we leave behind Murray’s character and his presumably fascinating story to follow Brody’s character.

But I get ahead of myself. The film has a prologue, The Hotel Chevalier, that sets the stage in a unique way. There, we are introduced to Jason Schwartzman’s character Jack, who is spending time in a hotel in Paris when his girlfriend from America, played by Natalie Portman, shows up for a rendezvous. In a short few minutes, we see his emotional barrenness, his inability to communicate, and even his cruel way of mistreating her. While it’s played with Anderson’s quirky sense of comedy, we realize that something is wrong with this guy.

Darjeeling explains to us what is wrong. Jack, Peter (Brody), and Francis Whitman (Owen Wilson), are brothers who haven’t seen each other in a year. Some time ago, their mother left their father and moved to India. She didn’t even return last year when their father died unexpectedly, the last time the brothers have seen each other. Now, Francis has brought them together to travel through India as a way of rediscovering themselves and, unbeknown to them, reunite them with their mother.

So begins their spiritual quest. What becomes clear is that each of them bears the scars of a youth that remains in the background. Francis is a control freak, Jack seems incapable of expressing emotion, and Peter displays a weird process of mourning his father’s death. Each of the quirks becomes occasion for odd comedy in the Anderson universe, but each emerges with a common narcissism as a way of dealing with their past. This kind of self-involvement quickly shows each of them as an unlikely candidate for a spiritual quest of any sort, and the journey quickly becomes a farce as a result.

While they set out to find themselves along the road, they slowly come to recognize the inadequacy of this kind of search. Their answer will not be found in a mystical encounter, something that each of them is grossly unsuited for. Nonetheless, their journey is not without hope.

In the course of this journey, there is occasion to explore their relationships, and in that exploration lies the strength of the piece. Along with a unique visual and writing style, Anderson is cultivating a unique commentary on family, letting Darjeeling build on Life Aquatic and The Royal Tennenbuams in particular. He seems to see in family a safe place within which to express our eccentricities and to find healing for the challenges of the past. In his creative expressions, here as in the other films, he invites us to consider the complexity and the diverse ways of expressing this healing. In that light, the metaphor of journey, seen through the train of Darjeeling and the boat of Life Aquatic, seems to support his vision of healing.

Darjeeling seems to embrace the tension of family life, that there are equal parts acceptance and change as we learn to live with one another. The characters that emerge at the end are pretty much the characters that we meet at the beginning, though perhaps a little wiser, a little more sympathetic to each other, and a little more capable of handling the challenges that they face in each of their lives. I like that idea, as it invites us to consider family as healing place in a life of incremental change. In a fast food world, where we are bombarded with false promises of instant life change, I embrace the reminder that change, whether that is overcoming the failures of the past, mourning for loss, or the emotional hiccups of our lives, does not come quickly, and that one of the most powerful salves we can hope for is family to walk with us along the way.