Magical Mystery Tours 2 comments

By A.G. Harmon

I saw half of The Darjeeling Limited when I woke up on a plane back from Europe. That I could comprehend what was going on, and that my favorable opinion remains in the same hazy nether-world after seeing the whole thing, says as much for Wes Anderson movies in general as it does for this one in particular.

In this outing, Anderson sets a trio of brothers on a "spiritual journey" across "mystical India" after the death of their father. Mostly despising movies about "spiritual journeys," and deeply suspicious of anything that uses a train across India to achieve one, I was intrigued only because Anderson was at the helm.

The quirky dynamics of strange families have been the writer/director's comfortable shtick in Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (the last of which features Anderson regular Bill Murray—the coolest man on earth—to fine effect). The casualness with which Anderson assembles the components of his films is aggravating to some. Large casts of talented actors speak in arch, contradictory dialogue (e.g.: Her: "Whatever happens in the end, I don't want to lose you as my friend"; Him: "I promise, I will never be your friend; no matter what; ever").

With plots generally comic but intermittently poignant, and with surprise rabbits of literal metaphors popping up from time to time, some think Anderson is playing a joke on everybody, satirizing his audience—a man too clever by half. That in and of itself would win my admiration, but I'm convinced there's more to him. He's found a way to make movies that are singularly his, that drop the gags at various points to allow for lovely, true moments, taking their power from the contrast to their odd surroundings.

In The Darjeeling Limited, Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman, also co-writer with Anderson and Roman Coppola), who haven't seen each other since their father's death, meet up on a Bollywood-style train across the Thar Desert. Francis, bearing a destroyed, bandaged face from a near-death car accident, has arranged the trip, and each brother carries a bag that belonged to their father (literal metaphor here), along with his own individual troubles: Peter has left his pregnant wife, and Jack has run off from a girlfriend who is constantly running off from him.

Francis will not tell them where they're going, but insists that they say "yes" to everything. And as the obsessive, task-oriented leader, he orchestrates all the things they are to say "yes" to. The other boys resist this, in brotherly fashion. Peter brags that their father loved him best and brandishes the man's personal items as testament to his superior, beloved position. Jack (the star of a short, foreshadowing film that prefaces the main feature), rails at the others' condescension.

The boys go to shrines and become distracted, arrange mountain-top rituals and fumble their execution, fight savagely and get thrown from the train. They also sauce up with every medication they can lay their hands on, taking faux trips to false oblivions, eluding the reality they supposedly seek. Only when they witness and participate in a tragedy involving three young boys does their trip's purpose take shape, an event they could not have planned. That, along with the secret reason for the journey, rounds the movie out and makes brothers of brothers who need reminding that they're brothers.

Pilgrimages are messy, contradictory affairs (see The Canterbury Tales), never living up to the brochure. Thousands of miles just to light a candle at Lourdes, and there's an incredibly loud ambulance in the near distance; thousands of miles more to knee-scale the Holy Staircase in Rome, and somebody breaks into a laughing jag over the size of the waddling rump just ahead; on a trip to the wailing wall, your watch is stolen.

For all the imposed gravity, the vulgar world won't cooperate. You end up remembering more of the people you went with than the ceremony itself. Still, as the brothers find, some good comes of it. What you’d hoped for happens—in a roundabout way. It works out, largely, and you're glad you went; mostly glad; all in all.