Watching Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited, which is mostly set in India's Rhajistan region, is a bit like experiencing India itself. In that country, unlikely pairings leap out at you from every street corner, carnality nuzzling up next to spirituality, gurus dispensing wisdom amidst festering mounds of garbage, holy men meditating beneath garish posters for the latest Bollywood blockbuster. The extremes are more extreme than anything you think you're prepared for and then pumped up further by Willy Wonka acid-trip colors and smells that sear your olfactory memory forever.
Anderson's movie doesn't take us quite this far into the unknown, but, like India itself, The Darjeeling Limited is surreal without even trying. It's all a little hard to wrap your head around.
Happily, it's a chaos we can live with. The Darjeeling Limited often seems closer to fever dream than real life, but it's cohesive in ways that the director's previous film, The Life Aquatic, wasn't. The color-coded confusion and calculated whimsy that got the better of Life Aquatic occasionally creep in, but Darjeeling is a funnier and more focused trip, one that seems to spring from the same emotionally genuine place that allowed audiences to connect with previous Anderson success stories like The Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore. Darjeeling's free-form storytelling takes a while to warm up to, but it eventually sucks us in, the loosey-goosey structure cleverly mirroring the disjointed journey of the movie's protagonists.
Anderson gives us three strangers on a train — semi-estranged brothers Francis (Owen Wilson), Jack (Jason Schwartzman) and Peter (Adrien Brody) — reuniting them for what the eldest promises will be a "spiritual journey" across India. (It's a promise made so solemnly it's impossible to mistake for anything other than totally absurd, like most everything that transpires here.) Dad has just kicked the bucket, and all three siblings are in various states of emotional duress: Jack's just been dumped by a girlfriend; Peter's about to become a father with a woman he's not entirely committed to; and Francis may have deliberately crashed his motorcycle into a tree (a plot-point particularly jarring in light of Wilson's recent real-life suicide attempt). So what better time for a little sightseeing, soul-searching and brotherly bonding? And then there's that little matter of checking in on mom (Anjelica Huston), a self-involved grand dame who's abandoned the family for a convent in the foothills of the Himalayas.
The brothers indulge themselves in synchronized chain-smoking, keep themselves buzzed with potent Indian painkillers, squabble over their recently deceased father's belongings and engage in virtually nonstop non sequiturs and poker-faced kvetching. (Deadpan levels here sometimes seem to be flirting with inertia.)
The bitching continues even during visits to holy shrines; the squabbles occasionally mutate into physical brawls; pepper spray and poisonous snakes are produced; the snake gets loose on the titular train; and Schwartzman plays passive-aggressive sex games with a sad-eyed stewardess in the train's bathroom. All of this plays out to the comic irritation of the other passengers on the train, notably a pair of super-sized German tourists and a turbaned Indian overseer with an inexplicably invisible accent.
Anderson applies meticulously measured rhythms to even the film's most screwbally impulses (occasionally punctuating them with dreamy, slow-motion passages), so that The Darjeeling Limited almost feels like a Marx Brothers movie on Thorazine. Anderson's characters do their slo-mo scramble, moving through the train like doped-up rats in a maze, being driven crazy by their confined quarters (a predicament indirectly descended from A Night at the Opera's famous stateroom scene). The thing of it is, though, that Darjeeling's train is neither maze nor microcosm, and these rodents were crazy long before they stepped on board.
There's a vaguely melancholic underpinning to all this silliness, and it eventually bubbles to the surface when unexpected tragedy plunges the characters (and us) into cold reality, as a funeral in India conjures up memories of the bungled funeral in America (for the siblings' father) that precipitated this trip. The shift of emotional gears is momentarily jarring, but it puts additional flesh on the characters' bones at an auspicious moment, and soon enough Darjeeling is back on its idiosyncratic track — careening toward a final confrontation with the characters' control-freak mother, visions of a man-eating tiger and a penultimate tracking shot that somehow manages to connect and make sense of many of the movie's disparate aspects.
As usual, Anderson embellishes the proceedings with fabulously color-coded sets, image compositions that define the word quirky and amazing old pop songs (this time from The Kinks and Rolling Stones), given strange, new life in fresh surroundings. The healing the brothers come to India for never quite happens, but it hardly seems to matter; the journey is pleasure enough.
And anyway, when our heroes finally abandon those handsome but heavy suitcases they've spent the entire film lugging around — more "emotional baggage" inherited from the dead father, discarded in a final, ecstatic slo-mo burst — it's close enough to liberation to keep everybody happy.
I'm Not There is Here, Sort Of
Boys Don't Cry. Kids. I Shot Andy Warhol. Velvet Goldmine. Safe. Poison. Swoon. Go Fish. Happiness. Hedwig and the Angry Inch. One Hour Photo. Far From Heaven. If you're familiar with these groundbreaking independent films, whether you know it or not, you know Christine Vachon.
She's the very hands-on producer of each and every one of the aforementioned movies, as well as many others, making her one of the most important figures in America's independent film movement. For the past 15 years, Vachon has sought out, nurtured and brought to fruition some of the most provocative and influential movies around. Her new project is director Todd Haynes' much-talked-about I'm Not There, and on Thurs., Oct. 25, she'll be bringing the film — or parts of it, at least — to Tampa.
As audacious a biopic as you're likely to find, I'm Not There stars no less than six actors (including Christian Bale, Richard Gere and Cate Blanchett) as various "manifestations" of Bob Dylan, and critics are already furiously puzzling over what it all means. You'll have a chance to get the inside scoop when Vachon shows up to screen parts of the new film and field questions beginning at 4 p.m. at the University of Tampa's Reeves Theater. Reeves Theater is located in the U.T. campus' Vaughan Center at 401 W. Kennedy Blvd., and the event is free and open to the public. For more information contact Tom Garrett at 941-544-8888 or CircaFilm@aol.com.
This article appears in Oct 24-30, 2007.