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The Darjeeling Limited

Editorial Review

Editorial Review

Three Stooges antics mingle with subtler silliness, painful life-wisdom, bittersweet change and his trademark whimsy in this unmistakable Wes Anderson special. Anderson again explores the sad peculiarity of a dysfunctional family, in what could be viewed as a companion-piece to The Royal Tenenbaums. But he enters new territory by removing the quirky siblings to colourful Rajasthan, where heady exoticism and atmospheric alien culture all have their effect on the damaged Whitman brothers and their tragi-comic personal journeys.

Francis (Wilson) has organised this odyssey a year after the brothers buried their father, their mother (Huston) went AWOL and they parted acrimoniously, each with a share of dad's luxurious luggage. Francis has planned every detail. Middle brother Peter (Brody) is about to become a father and is anxiously pondering why he married. Youngest brother Jack (Schwartzman) is a writer mourning a recent break-up and furiously denying that his fiction is an ill-disguised chronicle of their lives.

Despite all Francis's efforts to control the other two, his plans go awry when they stray from temple visits into a string of disasters. Blatantly symbolic is the motif of the luggage, to which the brothers cling jealously, along with their resentments. Owen Wilson, without whom Anderson has never made a film, plays the eldest brother with a haunted insecurity behind his confident humour. Wilson's Francis has recently had a near-fatal accident, so for most of the film his face is bashed up, his remarkable nose hidden under a bandage.

The film is preceded by a short in which Schwartzman's heartbroken Jack is holed up in a Paris hotel when his ex-lover (Natalie Portman) turns up. It's a more apt prologue than it initially appears, the incident paying off dividends aboard The Darjeeling Limited. Watch for a stunning last shot that goes straight to the heart.

 

Angie Errigal, December 2007