Darjeeling Limited

Ok, I'm starting a new thing: movie reviews. Since I can't be with friends in TO to watch movies with, then I can at least make some suggestion based on stuff I've seen.

"Darjeeling Limited"
Dir.: Wes Anderson
If you like Wes Anderson's previous movis ("Rushmore", "The Life Aquatic", "Bottle Rocket", "The Royal Tenenbaums") odds are good you'll like this. It's not as comedic as his others, that's not to say this isn't a funny movie, it's very funny, but it has a different weight to it. It's his most melancholic, I suppose. Anderson has built a career on making quirky, dysfunctional-character driven, visually inventive movies, and this continues the trend.

It's the story of 3 estranged brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody, and Jsaon Schwartzman) who meet in India to go ona spiritual journey to rekindle their relationship. From the start, it's obvious they all carry baggage, baggage made manifest by the old luggage left to them by their dead father. This baggage haunts them and follows them around on their journey throughout the movie. They are all running from something (new family, old girlfriend, themselves) to something else which they can't identify, and ultimately towards somebody who has shaped who they have become and much of their pain (I won't give it away...). Each of them is complex and their relationship to one another as brothers is equally complex. They haven't spoken to each other for a year, since their father's funeral, or seen their mother since before then either. Yeh, they got issues....

The movie is as much about the 3 brothers as it is a sort of love letter to India and all it's elements. In many of Anderson's movies he constructs these minutely detailed, beautifully coloured, quirky set pieces. Well, that's India and so the setting seems appropriate. Anderson, apparently, claims this movie has been influenced by Jean Renoir's Indian movie "The River" and Indian director/writer Sanjit Roy's films and stories. And you feel it. The country breathes and lives in the space around these 3 Americans in their jackets and slacks. It permeates every inch of their environment and it makes the viewer see it as more than a backdrop for a movie. This movie could not have been set anywhere else.

Train rides always seem like metaphors for life to me, so I think see what Anderson is trying to do with this film: as the train (the Darjeeling Limited) moves along, the brothers deal with their issues, have adventures, and learn about themselves and each other on the journey, resolving much in the end, or at least learning enough about how to deal with one another. That's life. The metaphor is highlighted late in the movie when you see all the characters in the movie sitting in separate compartments on the train, even though many of them aren't on the literal train. And, like life, it isn't a nice well-paced narrative either. This movie is a bit of a shambling mess, lurching along at its own pace. That's life too.

It's heartbreaking, it's reaffirming, it's funny. It's quintessential Wes Anderson. And that's good because he's one of the most original American directors working today.