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Accidental pilgrims

In Anderson's film, life needn't be limited
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
January 30th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Unlimited discoveries. Wilson, Brody and Schwartzman pass through India.
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With his interest in the moods of a moment over structured plotting, director Wes Anderson is like a cool Chekhov. His characters, like those of the Russian playwright’s, also share a very lucid sense of futility, though they never fully abandon the idea of hope.
As Chekhov’s three sisters were privileged women desperately searching for meaning in their lives, so Anderson’s three wealthy brothers — Francis, Peter and Jack Whitman — seek a way out of their estrangement from each other and from the world. For the Prozorov sisters, escape from their current provincial state is imagined as a journey back to Moscow, where they were happiest as children. For the Whitman brothers, it’s a spiritual quest through India, leading them, eventually, to their mother’s convent at the foot of the Himalayas, where they hope to finally quell the hurt of having been, for all intents and purposes, abandoned children.
These three grown men, still rivalrous and untrusting of each other, are far too emotionally immature to fully realize what it is they’re attempting. The intent of a spiritual quest is all rather vague to them, as they have no real faith in anything. And so they subscribe to a type of cafeteria mysticism, accepting the credible and incredible with equal complacency, becoming casual votaries for any cult or temple going.
The reality is that the “quest” is only a self-deluding excuse for movement that might allow them to momentarily forget that they are, metaphorically speaking, running in place. But after they stumble upon a genuine tragedy, these three accidental pilgrims will begin to experience true transcendence.
As this is an Anderson film, there is a sly, melancholy wit running through this cinematic trip — and Darjeeling Limited is a trip, from its hilarious opening (with a panicked Bill Murray trapped in a miniature taxi speeding through streets clogged with beggars and cows) to its joyous conclusion, with the Whitmans running after the departing Bengal Lancer Express and literally getting rid of all their baggage.
The finest aspect of this very personal, often oblique, film is the brothers’ relationships with each other. Francis (Owen Wilson) has all the faults of an eldest sibling. He’s bossy (the daily itineraries, all freshly laminated, are his doing) and unthinkingly speaks as if his brothers had no real minds of their own. “Stop including me!” an exasperated Jack (Jason Schwartzman) whines throughout.
Peter (Adrien Brody) possesses all the passive-aggressiveness expected of a middle child, while Jack is the brooding loner who has never (even physically) measured up to his brothers.
Like unparented boys, the three live on whim and impulse. Peter decides to buy a cobra, which will get loose on the Darjeeling Limited train. Jack, the hopeless romantic, hits up the attractive train steward, Rita (Amara Karan), by asking, “Do you want to go in the bathroom and smoke a cigarette with me?”
Francis is the biggest mess, arriving in India with most of his head and face bandaged. He tells the others that he was in a car accident, though a more ominous explanation will arrive toward the film’s conclusion.
The brothers’ complete dislocation (to the point of them never really feeling present) is wonderfully captured in the dialogue. “I wonder if the three of us would’ve been friends in real life,” Jack says at one point. “Not as brothers, but as people.” Jack, who is a published short story writer, is perhaps the one who suffers most from an inability to distinguish between fact and fiction. After his brothers take umbrage at some of the things about themselves that he’s included in his work, a shocked Jack will sputter, “The characters, of course, are fictional.”
The performances are all as stylishly nonchalant and finely composed as Anderson’s film, which is itself a stylistic fetish of Indian art and colors. The Subcontinent does become a magical zone in Darjeeling Limited, and is obviously relished by the director. “I love the way this country smells,” says a changed Peter. “I’ll never forget it. It’s kind of spicy.”
The film is prefaced by Anderson’s short film Hotel Chevalier, where we first meet Jack in a hotel room waiting for the arrival of a troublesome girlfriend, wonderfully played by Natalie Portman. She also crops up in a cameo in Darjeeling, in what is perhaps the most perfect, life-affirming scene in all of Anderson’s films.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (30/01/2008):

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