Review of The Darjeeling Limited (2007) by Christopher C — 12 Apr 2011

Wes Anderson's THE DARJEELING LIMITED has three brothers meeting up for a train journey through India after a year of not talking. The youngest Jack (Jason Schwartzman) is a budding writer and womanizer, Peter (Adrien Brody) is a married man intimidated by the prospect of children, and the eldest Francis (Owen Wilson) is a rich business recovering from a motorcycle accident. The three have been separated since the death of their father, and Francis wants them to rediscover their brotherly solidarity.

THE DARJEELING LIMITED, for all its "exotic" setting, is pretty similar to Anderson's previous films THE LIFE AQUATIC and THE ROYAL TENNENBAUMS with its story of a family that has long squabbled but which, after many trials and tribulations over the film, finds peace together in the end. Having seen all of Wilson's earlier output, I found THE DARJEELING LIMITED basically repeating a formula. It's an entertaining film to an extent, but Anderson is stuck in a rut. The treatment of India in the film sits uneasy with me. The train journey the brothers take is a fantasy, and the Indians the movie among are stereotypes with none given much of a personality (the two actors playing Indian train employees are in fact Westerners). At one point a village child dies, and it's almost appalling how Anderson uses this to advance the plot of the three brothers as if it were a mechanical action, with no sympathy to how the villagers around them would feel.

The cinematography is fairly elegant, and a few slapstick scenes drew a chuckle. Most memorable was a commentary on the trend well-known to travelers that, no matter how much it looks like you'll have a bus to yourself in the Third World, it will always been crammed full by the time it leaves. Still, I find RUSHMORE or THE ROYAL TENNENBAUMS to still be, almost a decade on, Wilson's strongest achievements.