Everybody loves Wes Anderson films. He is a rabble-rouser, a director who has made his art out of the adolescent mission, that abstraction within us which feels like a child but thinks and speaks as if it were an adult, with grand gestures and conceit. For our inner neurotic, it is easy to relate to him. Think of the vitality of Max Fischer, the main character of his film “Rushmore,” the flag bearer of 90s sass. His films are oiled with a poignancy that has gained Anderson a loyal following of fans who hold his films up as the ultimate measuring tape in new age comedy. For at least this reason the world needs a Wes Anderson.
His latest work, “The Darjeeling Limited,” is a blend of his past work and in Anderson’s repertoire, seems his most bold, advancing his art from the motif of adolescence to that of adulthood. In execution, it is a creature of a film, filled with so much vim and verve that it almost hurts to experience it. It stumbles to show more than it has to say, and say more than it wants to show, and succeeds at both with the art of a manicurist: keen, precise and a little bit tacky.
Anderson’s latest triumvirate of lost souls includes Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody), and Jack (Jason Schwartzman), three dysfunctional brothers whose father has died, and have otherwise been operating on varying spiritual frequencies.
With “Darjeeling,” Anderson has embraced his own myth and plunged deeper into it than before, even going so far as to announce this to the press as the final film in his “father trilogy,” as if to imply that he is the first artist who has had Daddy issues. Left unrestrained, his fetish for faux pas and family drama curdles what could have been some of the greater scenes of the film, such as the brothers’ confrontation with their mother outside of an Indian nunnery, in which man-eating beasts are mentioned – a contemptible, unnecessary metaphor for the hostile world of mean adulthood.
Thankfully the movie’s most graceful moments remain unaffected by its director. Francis, Peter, and Jack walking through a funeral to the Kinks’ track “Lola vs. Powerman” drives through the soul like a sledgehammer, and the sprightly punches of touch and go between the brothers throughout their voyage speaks of something more than the elegant inelegance for which Anderson has come to be known.
A redeeming attribute of “The Darjeeling Limited” is not the destination or the trajectory of the train, or even of Anderson’s intentions, but their backdrop: the feral South Asian vista and the flair of sweeping plains, more awake than any urban sprawl can claim. As Schwartzman’s character puts it, “even the people are beautiful here.” This is a self-reflection everybody must learn in the film, to reconcile the beauty of the fleeting moment with a world where, for the most part, there are no longer trains to be stuck in and we are left to fend for our own brotherhood.
Perhaps “Darjeeling” is the perfect film in the way its themes bend over backwards to glaze over its faults. Smart at hiding its lack of excellence, it still niggles at the nerves and scrapes off the tongue, like a harsh tea. “The Darjeeling Limited” is as lasting on the brain as a daydream and as affecting as a cotton candy.
