Innocence Abroad

[October 10th, 2007]

Wes Anderson’s fifth movie, The Darjeeling Limited , follows a well-trodden path—at this point, it is safe to assume the director will never tire of his damaged boys and their fragile toys—but nothing in the film matches the dull inevitability of its reviews. Here, in ascending order of stupidity, are just a few of the things said about Anderson in the past month: He is addicted to quirk. His movies are sealed, lifeless worlds. He is criminally unwilling to address the pressing issues of our times. He is an unconscious racist.

Well, you can see where this sort of thing is going. The old critical consensus on Wes Anderson was that he was the youthful poet of melancholy; the new accepted wisdom is that he is blinkered, hermetic and possibly reactionary. When the worm turns this radically on an artist, it is usually safe to assume he hasn’t changed at all. And this is exactly the case with Anderson.

The Darjeeling Limited begins with a tableau of two men racing headlong down an Indian train platform; one is a mournful-looking businessman played by Bill Murray, and the other is a lanky Adrian Brody, wearing a bewildered gaze and sunglasses that suggest Luke Wilson’s Richie Tenenbaum. And then—wouldn’t you know it?—the image slows to a stately crawl, and opening notes of a Kinks song melt onto the soundtrack. We’re not in India at all: We’re in Andersonville. East is east and Wes is Wes, and never the twain shall meet.

Nothing in the movie’s first 30 minutes does much to discourage this impression. Brody plays one of three brothers Whitman—Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson complete the trio—who have boarded an ornate train for a “spiritual journey,” which mostly seems to consist of consuming a lot of spirits, along with tranquilizers and prescription medications for which they do not have prescriptions. The Whitmans are not model travelers. They treat India like their personal exotic theme park. They bicker and abuse the help—especially a porter (Waris Ahluwalia) who essentially doubles as a nanny. They bring a deadly cobra onto the train. They are, in short, providing ammunition for Anderson’s detractors.

But what elevates Darjeeling , what makes it a movie well worth seeing, is how aware the director is of limitations—in his characters and himself. “How can a train be lost?” Schwartzman complains during a delay. “It’s on rails.” Anderson has always recognized the insular nature of his heroes and his atmosphere (I’d argue his fastidious sets and shots just show the inside of his dreamers’ heads), but at the midway point of this new film, he derails the Whitmans. They get kicked off the locomotive, then find themselves in a small village where they rescue two drowning children—and fail to rescue a third. The death blasts a hole into the movie, if not quite into the brothers. Brody holds a dead boy in his arms, and blurts in shock: “I didn’t save mine.” The tragedy was supposed to be his possession, a catharsis for his personal neuroses. But it isn’t—and he doesn’t know what to do with it.

The question at the heart of any criticism of The Darjeeling Limited —and Anderson’s directorial vision—is whether he knows what to do with the messy, absurd world. I don’t think this movie provides a definitive answer, but it contains some encouraging signs. The greatest hope is provided by Schwartzman’s repeated protest when his brothers see themselves in the short stories he reads to them: “The characters are all fictional.” He finally abandons this ruse, tacitly admitting that every tale he writes is stunted by his crippling, narcissistic obsession with his own story.

Anderson’s man-boys have always been limited; it was a chief reason for their initial allure. (“They’ll never catch me,” declared Owen Wilson’s Dignan in Bottle Rocket , “’cause I’m fuckin’ innocent.”) But even as the critics tire of this quality, Anderson continues to study it, and the repeated observation has revealed something he acknowledges as sad and self-defeating. The Whitmans can’t escape their personal history long enough to notice other people, as much as they eventually yearn to. It is often noted that Anderson’s storytelling owes a debt to J.D. Salinger, but his films also contain a great deal of a much better writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald: There’s a similar critique of entitled, callous and very lonely people. And there’s something about that first Darjeeling image, two men sprinting in slow motion for a train, that brings to mind The Great Gatsby ’s famous words about how “tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further....” Wes Anderson beats on, while his characters are borne back ceaselessly into their pasts.