The Darjeeling Limited

Review

In his trim memoir An Actor and His Time, John Gielgud quotes an exhortation by Edith Evans: �Don’t indulge yourself by showing off; the moment that you begin to find that you can do something well, you must control it and do it more selectively.� She’s talking to actors, but the line could be directed at Wes Anderson, the fantastically talented writer-director whose twee rectangular dollhouse frames (with their lush colors and coy off-symmetry) tend to upstage his characters and their emotions�unless those emotions are all along the lines of, �Why am I trapped in this dollhouse?�

The good news is that in the short Hotel Chevalier, the overture to Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (it’s screening at the New York Film Festival and can be seen online), form and content magically gel. The setting is a Paris hotel room, the male character a tense, forlorn young man named Jack (Jason Schwartzman). A phone call breaks his solipsistic reverie: His ex-girlfriend has tracked him down. A backstory emerges, vaguely. She was unfaithful, it seems, and he fled, unable to cope with his jealousy and rage. Now he waits on the bed in a trim gray suit, a little boy dressed to look like a man but more like a boy than before. The woman (a curvy, elfin Natalie Portman) arrives and wastes little time before taking off her clothes. Is she back to stay or just reaffirming her hold? Does she even know what she wants? The room, with its foreshortened background, is a child’s hiding place, violated now by this messy grown-up sex stuff. The wealthy child can control his environment, but how can he control his lover? The refrain of a song he plays over and over is, �I want to look inside your head/Yes I do.�

The feature that follows, The Darjeeling Limited proper, is hit and miss, but its tone of lyric melancholy is remarkably sustained. Jack turns out to be Jack Whitman, one of three brothers who haven’t seen each other since the death of their father in a taxicab accident. They’re reuniting in India for what’s meant to be a journey of self-discovery, on a train called the Darjeeling Limited�another of Anderson’s overdesigned dollhouses, but with a crucial difference: This one moves through a real countryside.

It’s quickly apparent that these brothers�children of privilege, with no apparent financial worries�are floundering in the void left by their dad. Francis (Owen Wilson), his face still bandaged from a horrific accident, has assumed a patriarchal role, planning the brothers’ days down to the breaks for meditation. Peter (Adrien Brody) is six weeks away from becoming a real father�which for some reason has spurred him to leave for India without mentioning his trip to his wife. Jack is still running from the memory of his girlfriend, whose answering machine he regularly phones (he has the code) to listen to her messages. All three drink, smoke, and pass narcotics bottles back and forth. The train is like a movable circus, with a prim, disapproving steward (Waris Ahluwalia) who struggles to keep the fatherless boys in line�he’d fit right into a Marx Brothers movie�and a stewardess named Rita (Amara Karan) with a dizzy attraction to the woebegone Jack. (A sample line: �I have a boyfriend. I just broke up with him. Or I’m about to.�)

Anderson wrote The Darjeeling Limited with Schwartzman and Roman Coppola. They’re gifted, clever men, but none of them have much perspective on their characters’ overentitlement. What they know, of course, is what it’s like to grow up with insanely narcissistic parents who leave them both spoiled and bereft�globe-trotting basket cases. (The brothers’ vulnerability is underscored by Wilson’s recent suicide attempt�his bandages seem chillingly prophetic.) Trudging through rural India after their train has abandoned them, the Whitmans happen on three boys who tumble into rapids. Is their fragility supposed to mirror the Whitmans’? Is their tightly knit, patriarchal community supposed to offer a contrast? I’m not sure what Anderson is going for, but the interlude feels exploitive. The final sequence saves the film. The journey turns out to have an end�a convent in the foothills of the Himalayas, where the Whitman boys’ mother (Anjelica Huston) has fled to become a nun. Huston gives one of her irrationally great performances�the mother’s fear of her sons’ demands is between the lines, not in them, and you don’t put it all together until she has left the scene. Visually, Anderson tries something new: He zooms in and out of his frames; he violates his own immaculate canvases. India turns out to be the perfect Wes Anderson movie set. You almost believe that the color has a spiritual component, that it’s a way of clinging to hope in the face of an indifferent universe. — David Edelstein

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New York Magazine Reviews

• David Edelstein's Full Review (10/1/07)