MOVIE REVIEW: The Darjeeling Limited

By Brian Abrams

In 1998, Wes Anderson was critically lauded for his prep school slacker flick Rushmore, and it all went downhill from there. Ever since, the writer/director has puked up the most pretentious and annoying movies onto the big screen, and they get worse every time.

More than a decade ago, when Wes Anderson teamed up with Luke and Owen Wilson to shoot his quirky debut Bottle Rocket, the Texas trio made a pretty funny and charming buddy comedy out of it. With little budget and a lot of heart, Rocket emitted a sort of just-cocking-around-with-the-camera feel, as if the film's culprits weren't taking the whole thing so seriously. Rushmore has a faint sense of that carefree vibe – it's arguably Anderson's best – but, beyond that, Anderson's other films are smug.

Take The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, for examples: both cloying and colorful movies, they provided fantasies for fruit loops who envy the empty lives of these spoiled rotten characters. Both are a gas to watch if you're into loud watercolor palettes, but, when it comes to plot and direction, the meat and potatoes of moviemaking, they're both weak at the knees.

The Darjeeling Limited follows this same arty farty formula, another platform for Anderson to show off his eye for hipster art direction and his disdain for actual storytelling.

The movie follows three rich kid brothers (Owen Wilson, Schwartzman, Adrien Brody) across India on a “spiritual” journey so they can bond with one another and overcome the grief from their father's death from one year ago. The excuse for a plot reminds me of the cinematic disaster Garden State, in which our leading man (another cutesy actor, Zack Braff) struggles with post-adolescent anxiety by scooting around town on a vintage motorcycle while listening to EMO rock and with Natalie Portman by his side.

Poor baby.

The same goes for this silver spoon-fed crowd, who heal heartache by shopping for chochkies in the Eastern Hemisphere, smoking cigarettes wherever they please, and shtupping an exotic beauty in a train car. To investigate further into these characters' “tortured” lives, Anderson has provided a short film prequel online (www.hotelchevalier.com) which shows Schwartzman's poet character lounging in a sexy French hotel room with yet another character played by Portman... these guys have it rough, huh?

And, aside from the agony of watching these brats “find themselves," even worse is tolerating Anderson's celluloid masturbation; creating unnecessary sequences only so he can show off his eye for aesthetic. So much energy is spent on mixing sheik outfits with colorful backdrops.

One sequence has us watch the three lament over a boy's death at an Indian village just so Anderson can continue filming a powder blue stucco wall in the background. Then, the three brothers all exit in white pajamas and walk in slow motion to the native's funeral. In another scene, Brody's character argues with shaving cream on his beard – just because he looks cool that way.

Sigh. How I miss the carefree, fun n' fratty filmmaking of Bottle Rocket. I'd pray that Anderson would revert back to that somehow, but I'm afraid it's a little useless. His movies still have that cocking-around-with-the-camera feel, but it's ostensibly for his own enjoyment, not ours.