April 1: The Darjeeling Limited (2007 -- Wes Anderson)

★★★

A smarmy Christian podcast I heard likes Wes Anderson: they see him as pro-family because his films center on family dynamics and the healing in them.  While I didn’t like their “family-friendly” attitude, the podcasters hit the nail on the head with their point about family dynamics in Anderson’s films.  The subject notwithstanding, the key question in Anderson’s films for me is whether he deals with family dynamics in a real way or through some gauze of cliché, convention, quirk or other distancing mechanism.

It’s distancing mechanisms in Darjeeling Limited.  The three brothers in this film all suffer from grief at the loss of their father and the fleeting – usually absent – affection of their mother, but the movie has them doing cute, stagey actions and speaking in stiff, artificial language around their hurt.  The plot here moves mechanically in a series of set pieces, and the film is burdened with overt symbols like the baggage (guess what it means) and repeated actions (do they TRUST Francis with the passports?).  This tone risks trivializing the very real pain and loss of the characters.

But something halfway works with this approach.  For one thing, the brothers seem almost childishly cute as they pose their way through their sense of loss and the problems this sense has created in their lives, and this childishness creates some sympathy.  I also respond to their movement through healing, initiated in the village and the funeral they’re able to participate in and advanced in their meeting with their conditional-love mother.  It’s corny and stagey, but it’s satisifying to watch them drop their baggage as they get on the departing train.

There are other elements in the movie I like, too.  It has a beautiful color palette of pastels and browns, and there are some great cinematic flourishes.  For example, the crane shot of the three brothers at the market is really skillful and fun as the camera swoops in on each of the three doing his shopping individually.  My favorite cinematic point is the interruption of the story with a series of images of the cars of the train, each interior representing a moment in the brothers’ lives or in the movie itself.  This brief moment of pure cinema is the most pleasing film moment in the movie.

Other things I like about the movie are the fun cameos – Angelica Huston and Barbet Schroeder in particular – and the music, which varies from pop to pop-with-Indian-arrangement to the fun, concluding French song.  These elements all work for me.

Even with all these very fine elements, the ironic distance that characterizes the film limited(!) my response.  While I like so much of what is going on here, and I like the trajectory of the characters, I found it hard to connect to or be really touched by the movie.  Amused? Yes.  Moved? No…