Wes Anderson's fifth feature is an enigmatic and insinuating film, a picture that certain Brits and connoisseurs of British colloquial English might call "a grower." It's been over a week since I saw The Darjeeling Limited for the first time, and I find that this tidy picture — it's only a hair over 90 minutes, and still well less than two hours if accompanied by its "Part One" short, the lovely Hotel Chevalier, which you should get off of iTunes pronto — more moving and funny the more I think about it.
The film is a riotously colorful journey across India by train, via which three — for all intents and purposes — orphaned brothers (Wilson, Brody, Schwartzman) seek to reconnect after a long estrangement.
This picture is quite deliberately not as fanciful as Anderson's prior feature, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (what with its cutaway sets, animated sequences, and whatnot). Anderson and his collaborators admit to making the conditions of the picture such that the meticulous director would have to surrender to the happy accident every now and again. Nonetheless, The Darjeeling Limited is still a terrific contraption of meticulous design and construction. One might as well face it — this is the kind of movie that Wes Anderson makes, and critics who profess to admire Anderson's talent and wit, while simultaneously suggesting that he ought to consider emulating, say, the Rossellini of Open City, should really save their breath or ink or pixels.
The movie does so many things so well — one such thing is realizing Brody's potential as a comic actor. Anderson sees Brody's face and recognizes not just its resemblance to Heckle and/or Jeckle but to Buster Keaton. His stick-figure frame wrapped in a perfect gray suit, Brody's mere physicality suffices to place a diacritical mark in each frame he's in. The fact that his character, Peter, is the only one of the three brothers who actually has something solid to hold onto outside of the dysfunctional familial relationship is one of the film's mysterious riches, one that only reveals itself after you've spent a certain amount of time letting the picture seep in.
And yet a large part of the delight of this picture is how enjoyable it is even as you remain unaware of its seeping in. The surface pleasures of the film are so beguiling that you might not catch its other spells right away. Withholding the prospect of too much of a direct connection between the viewer and the brothers is evidence of Anderson's larger purpose: This movie is as much, if not more, about the construction of fictions as it is about its ostensible plot. Wilson's Francis, trying to put his life back together after a suicide attempt, constructs the India trip, with its laminated itineraries, as a potential happy ending to his family saga. Brody's Peter seeks a continuance of the narrative of his late father (the last time the brothers all saw each other was at his funeral) by furtively, obsessively, hanging on to the patriarch's old possessions. Schwartzman's Jack is a writer of short stories — stories he insists are "entirely fictional." Much of the film's subtext is devoted to both peeling away and reinforcing that claim.
But The Darjeeling Limited is as much about fiction as it is about family. That it succeeds so well and so slyly even while dealing with these topics in its own stylish but unsparing way is reason for moviegoers to rejoice.
READ MORE: Critic's Choice: Best of 2007
VIEW FILM STILLS: The Darjeeling Limited
WATCH VIDEO: Darjeeling Q&A
