Movie Review: 'The Darjeeling Limited'
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Starring in "The Darjeeling Limited" are, from left, Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody.
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It's a kind of "Three Amigos in India," or "Marx Brothers Karamazov."
At the outset, long-legged Adrien Brody -- madly sprinting -- makes it with a final leap onto the train pulling out of the station, while huff-and-puffing businessman Bill Murray does not, in this offbeat adventure yarn called "The Darjeeling Limited."
Writer-director Wes Anderson gives us three semi-estranged American brothers meeting up for a "spiritual" train trek across India to find themselves individually and to re-bond collectively. They get their red forehead dots upon boarding.
- Starring: Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman.
- Rating: R for language.
- Web site: foxsearchlight.com/darjeeling
Eldest bro Francis (Owen Wilson), a control freak, has organized the whole thing, bringing along an assistant with a laminating machine to produce their daily itinerary. Francis needs all the help he can get: He's still limping and covered with bandages from a recent horrendous car accident.
Brothers Peter (Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman) have their own issues. Peter's is a 7-months-pregnant wife. Jack's is a not-yet-budding fiction career: "You want to read a short story I wrote?" he asks Francis. "How long is it?" Francis replies.
The spiritual quest derails due to overindulgence in over-the-counter meds, Jack's un-caste-conscious affair with a touchable train hostess (Amara Karan), and escalating run-ins with the severely bearded Chief Steward (Waris Ahluwalia) -- but mostly due to their old fraternal resentments, betrayals and misbehavior. Peter keeps borrowing Francis' belt without permission ("Ask first!").
Eventually, they get kicked off the train and stranded in the middle of a desert with 11 suitcases and the laminating machine. At which point, their journey -- and the film -- take an unexpected detour into seriousness. Some Indian boys get into trouble. There are two rescues, an attempted rescue and a truly moving funeral sequence before the switch back to comedy for Francis' secret agenda and a close encounter of the Anjelica Huston kind.
It is fun to watch these three fine actors with three of the most bizarre noses in captivity. Brody's has its own zip code. Indeed, he is a physical wonder in general. In his boxers, he looks like an upright hot dog on two toothpicks, with those amazing eyebrows and sad-sack eyes (covered, as often as possible, by his sleep mask). Brody is fabulous. Schwartzman nicely deadpans most of the time, except when his libido is in overdrive. Wilson is likewise fine, though seeing him so banged up and overwrought, it's hard not to think about his real-life troubles.
This is perhaps Anderson's most heartfelt and idiosyncratic (if hit-and-miss) film to date, more compassionate than "Rushmore" or "The Royal Tenenbaums," with a lyrical, lingering sense of melancholy. Look for the brilliantly surreal panning shot that wraps things up with tableaux of the characters as if they were all somehow in successive cars of the same train.
He's not aiming for shtick or "madcap" in "Darjeeling." It's slow, syncopated, situational comedy, almost like that of W.C. Fields. That battle over Francis' belt ends with: "There's been too much Indian giving over the years."
This "Darjeeling" may or may not be your cup of tea, but I found it a refreshing change from the usual old Lipton's.
Nice little bonus: Anderson's 13-minute "Hotel Chevalier" is a short companion piece to the main feature. Shot in Paris with Schwartzman and Natalie Portman, it depicts the end of brother Jack's previous romance and serves as a droll prologue to "Darjeeling."
First Published October 26, 2007 12:00 am
