"I didn't save mine": The Darjeeling Limited

by Christian De Matteo

HUGE

My life has been in a bit of chaos lately and it's thrown off my ability to get to premiers or even the movies in general.  This, as I'm sure you know, is for me pure tragedy.  What brought this tragedy to the Shakespearian level is that during this crazy, crappy time period, Wes Anderson released The Darjeeling Limited.

I don't miss Wes Anderson films.

Wes Anderson films are like birthdays, and the good kind I mean, not the ones I'm in now were, to paraphrase the great song that opens Joe Vs. the Volcano, "I'm just another year older and deeper in debt."  I mean birthdays when you were a kid and it meant you were going to get something awesome, that for that day, would entirely change the course of your life in a positive direction.  That's a Wes Anderson film to me.  In fact, the only film of his that didn't strike me that way was Bottle Rocket, his first.  That one just made me feel like my birthday was very much on the way.  Rushmore proved to be that birthday.  Since then I've celebrated The Royal Tennenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and now The Darjeeling Limited as I've finally found two hours of my life when I could go sit by myself in the theater and watch it.

It is brilliant.

I laughed for the entire hour and half, including during the twenty minutes I was also crying with a huge smile on my face.  Darjeeling is the story of three brothers who haven't seen each other in a year and who have all been very lost in the meantime.  They have been completely separate from each other and have all been in their own separate sadnesses.  The movie opens with them meeting on a train somewhere in India at the request of their, more organized and possibly worst off brother, played wonderfully by Owen Wilson.  The three, including Jason Swartzman and Adrien Brody fall quickly into the grooves of their old, quirky relationships.  And here is where the healing is meant to begin.

The beautiful thing about Wes Anderson movies is that when the healing is meant to happen, often a theme he works with, he doesn't just focus on his characters.  Somehow it's also about the audience, about all our separate pains and experiences.  The situations are always so quirkily human that you can't help but associate yourself with them.  This is probably because we all believe our own pains and sufferings are entirely unique of anyone else's so only the freakiest comparison will do.  And perhaps this is true.

The movie meanders with complete direction.  As our directionless heroes (despite laminated itinerary) move toward the hopeful direction of forward, we happily follow with them, identifying somehow with all of them, no matter how different they are from us.  The humor, as always, is close to complete deadpan, dry and under the radar, yet hysterically funny and outrageous in terribly quiet ways.  The writing is sharp and sparse, allowing the characters only the dialogue that matters to make them who they are and how they would comment.  The history comes out in pieces, drips out of each of them as they actually somehow do manage to get closer to healing even as they get further from understading the dangers of self-pity.  This will take more time.

As always, Anderson has created a story of family and the importance of it's connection, of the people we surround ourselves with and make our family, even if they already had the title.  Can we ever be willing friends with our family the way friends can become it?  He probes all these questions without seeming to probe anything, but instead takes us on a journey, a very intentional one, through humanity, love and the painful complexities of life that keep it interesting, even while they make us occasionally suicidal.

In the end, even if life isn't, it's all wonderful because, as Chekov believed it's all so damn funny.

But, I'm aware I'm getting too talky, thinky, or, at any rate, not movie reviewy enough.  You want the basics?  Absolutely.

Adrien Brody plays his part like he's been waiting his whole life to be in a Wes Anderson movie.  He's pitch-perfect.  He's a Wes Anderson character through and through and yet not a retread of any kind.  He fit's perfectly in the Anderson's quirky universe, but he's a new animal.  As a result, he delivers the most important line of the movie, which is in my title to this review.  Brody has impressed me since Liberty Heights and he continues to do so with every new movie.

Owen Wilson is also brilliant.  He plays a slightly different part than usual and he plays it wonderfully.  He's still funny, slightly strange, slightly haunted Wilson, but the haunting is newer and deeper.  Jason Shwartzman is wonderful as well.  I really liked him in Shopgirl and heard he was great in I Heart Huckabees (which I've yet to see) but here he really gets to play with his persona and does a very convincing job of being at once messed-up and still irresistible sexually to women.  Clever acting.

The screenplay by Anderson, Swartzman and Roman Coppola is good enough to make Sophia Coppola proud.  It hits all the right notes and discovers all the right things for the characters.  Great stuff here.  And the directing is brilliant.

The Darjeeling Limited is Wes Anderson at the top of his game.  This is Royal Tennenbaums Anderson.  This is my birthday.