I must be in an overly cynical mood today.  Regardless, I just finished watching Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited, which has recently come out on DVD.


This movie is yet another suitably quirky Anderson film.  I'm all for directors who put their stamp on their pictures, especially when it's to the degree where you can tell who made it just by looking at a brief clip.  I'm also all for characters that are idiosyncratic and different.  What I'm trying to say is, I really do like Wes Anderson, perhaps mostly because he doesn't make Julia Roberts movies.  Ever.  He has his own voice, and I applaud that.

That said, this movie was all style, no substance, which is what his movies sometimes can be, at their worst.

The Darjeeling Limited is built around a wonderful, interesting concept:  Three adult American brothers unite in India to reconnect.  The brothers are, of course, suitably quirky to the nth degree.  They are played by Owen Wilson (Francis), Adrian Brody (Peter) and Jason Schwartzman (Jack).  These oddball brothers are wealthy enough to stay endlessly at gorgeous Parisian hotels, tear up their return tickets from India and carry an Ipod with a speaker dock all through their Indian trip by train/bus/bike/etc, but they are duly pained by their father's death and their mother's negligence.  It was difficult for me to invest myself in their story-- they come off as exceedingly self absorbed, and while that may have worked for Margot Tenenbaum (in Anderson's highly enjoyable The Royal Tenenbaums), she was not filmed interacting with locals throughout third world India-- rather, she appeared in her natural environment of upper class New York City.  The characters here seemed to have permanently down turned, achingly sad eyes, overly glorified by many closeups and slow pans.  Oh, the pain of great wealth and great luggage!

I just read two critical essays on Wes Anderson’s new movie, The Darjeeling Limited. I won’t bore you with a synopsis of the essays. You can check them out by clicking here and here.

Wes Anderson movies have been a guilty pleasure of min. Not a lot of heads in the barrio get his humor. His movies reminds me of having a privileged upper class white friend who is insightful and fun to hang around with one on one. But once you were around his friends, he acts differently and treats you as more of a token ‘ethnic” friend then a human being. Any person of color who has these friends knows what I’m talking about. I don't feel like I'm looking way too into this, Something in Wes Anderson movies always made me feel a little uneasy and I thing both these critics unveiled what I always felt but never could express.

I'll defend Wes Anderson just a bit, to be fair. In the movie, The Royal Tenenbaums, one of the only characters with any dignity is the character, Henry Sherman, played by Danny Glover. In the movie, Henry has depth. He is a good man, smart, supportive and descent. He is a friend and financial adviser to Etheline Tenebaum, The family’s matriarch who kept the family together throughout the years despite the family's many pitfall. Both Henry and Etheline fall in love with each other and their love comes from their friendship. There is no fetishism or tokenism involved, just two old friends who fell in love.