THE DARJEELING LIMITED (R) **1/2

 

Directed by Wes Anderson. 91 minutes.

Starring Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, Angelica Huston, Bill Murray and Barbet Schroeder. Released by Fox Searchlight Pictures.

 

The ingredients are all there in The Darjeeling Limited for another great Wes Anderson film – the colorful art direction and costumes, the kooky but forlorn characters, the retro musical nuggets, slow motion photography, the lovingly and purposefully stilted dialogue and a healthy dose of humor blended with pathos – but something elemental is missing. I first experienced the director’s eccentric stylistics in his charmingly goofy 1995 debut Bottle Rocket and have been singing his praises from the mountaintops ever since, from his two masterpieces – Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums – to his misunderstood The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. His latest film includes elements – from similar editing and shooting styles to casting – of his previous works but the director appears to be randomly plugging them in, rather than using them to convey meaning.

 

The film follows the adventures of three brothers who are all in various stages of forlorn unrest and who need to escape from something. For Jack (Jason Schwartzman), the youngest of the trio, it’s a referenced but not seen girl he left in a Paris hotel, while, for elder Francis (Owen Wilson), it’s a recent suicide attempt, which, considering Wilson’s own recent near real life tragedy, it makes, at least, this part of the story all the more poignant. That leaves Peter (Adrien Brody), the middle brother who appears to be bitter because he is going to have a child with his wife, whom we also only briefly meet and whom, for whatever reason, he says he always feared would divorce him. This goes unexplained.

All three men are also in various stages of bereavement over the recent death of their father and their mother’s absence at the funeral.

 

One of the film’s finer moments is at the beginning when Anderson favorite Bill Murray, making a cameo here, chases down the film’s titular train and misses it, while Peter sprints by him and just makes it on board. Soul searching journeys are for young men, Anderson appears to tell us, and Murray’s character has learned this the hard way as he is left in the dust. For Anderson, the sequence also represents a moving on, of sorts, as his previous films all concerned men and their father figures. In The Darjeeling Limited, our three heroes’ father figure is under the ground.

 

But that still doesn’t explain what Anderson is trying to say here. Actually, what is he trying to say? The boys track down their mother and the scene appears to hold some sort of significance outside of the obvious but it’s hard to say exactly what we are supposed to derive here. Wilson makes mention on numerous occasions that the three are supposed to be on a spiritual journey but it is never clear whether Anderson is sincere about this or whether this is just fodder for poking fun at the trio’s semi-ridiculous attempts to find a path to spiritual enlightenment.

 

A flashback to their father’s funeral does not provide much help either. Nor does a scene when the three encounter three drowning boys and the death of one of the young children is apparently supposed to tie in with Peter’s fear of fatherhood. But the connection does not really hit home. In previous films, the director has successfully relied on music and slow motion photography to hammer at the heart – just think back to the sad dance to “Ooh La La” at the end of Rushmore or the heartbreaker of a moment when Gwyneth Paltrow steps off the bus to Nico’s “These Days” in Tenenbaums. In his latest film, Anderson seems to use combine music and slow-mo out of habit, rather than to comment on his characters.

 

I don’t mean to imply that I did not like The Darjeeling Limited. It’s difficult to be turned off by an Anderson film and his latest is equally funny and moving in parts. The performances, colorful set design and costumes and cinematography all work to the film’s benefit, though Anderson probably uses the shot-pan-reaction shot-pan back method a bit too much. To sort of quote protégé Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, Darjeeling is “minor Anderson.” The film works on enough levels for me to appreciate its artistry and enjoy a number of its sequences, but it just doesn’t break my heart – and I mean that as a compliment – in the way that the best of his films do.