Episode 75.5 - The Darjeeling Limited Review 7/10

The Darjeeling Limited - 2007 - Wes Anderson

I always like to give Wes Anderson the benefit of the doubt. I enjoyed Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and, as this blog will tell you, I loved Fantastic Mr. Fox and the thing that those two had in common was the use of Claymation. Perhaps he just needs to stick to that. The Darjeeling Limited was just really fucking pale and dry and all of that stuff that makes most people dislike Wes Anderson…and for the record, makes me dislike Jason Schwartzman, who co-wrote this movie because for some reason he thinks that hokey beatnik storytelling still works with the mainstream audience. I don’t know why every movie he’s in he seems to try to glorify his abilities; he pulled the same shit in I Heart Huckabees too as a poet that sucked and pissed everybody off. I swear; he is quickly becoming the Zach Galifianakis of indie drama. Or perhaps Zach just became the adult comedy version of him.

Anyway, here’s The Darjeeling Limited which is about three untrusting brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody, and Jason Schwartzman) who, for some reason that doesn’t make any real sense decide to hop a train and travel across India in the hopes of reconnecting and finding spiritual enlightenment with the help of perhaps the most boring itinerary every written. Naturally, things don’t according to plan and the three brothers pretty much just have to wing it which they do by utilizing the jokingly clichéd tactics that most people attribute to enlightenment and finding inner peace: they get high as kites until the world makes sense.

Problem is that this is Wes Anderson and Jason Schwartzman’s world, which never makes sense; it just lingers on idle like if Peter Gibbons from Office Space suffered from a severe case of depression and went slightly emo while in his hypnotic stupor. Like most dialogue from Wes Anderson movies, it just seems like it was a rough draft. I was half expecting the characters to turn to us and ask “how did that line work for you? Was that ok? Did it make sense and project the right emotion?” To which I would answer “Eh. Eh. And Eh,” but Wes Anderson shows undeserved confidence in his words and his jokes* and simply moves on to the next ones if they don’t work with a big “fuck you to the audience” like Steven Wright in his early days. Yes, I fully understand why people don’t like him. The Darjeeling Limited reminded me of this.

However, despite all of these problems, this movie did manage to do ok with me and if I ever wanted a movie that just put my brain in a daze that I then struggle to get out of, Darjeeling wouldn’t be a bad way to go. Some of it was actually pretty funny, some of it was actually pretty charming, nothing was horribly off kilter or offensive. Like a slow moving train it just kind of progressed, unstoppably, forcing the rest of the traffic in my brain to turn off its engine and wait, and for that, this movie was quite the success.  

Wes Anderson’s movies are usually ones with good concepts but poor executions. Sometimes he hits it like Fantastic Mr. Fox and sometimes he misses, but the concept itself makes the movie a cult classic, like Rushmore. The Darjeeling Limited will find itself somewhere in the middle and as Mr. Fox was a 9 and Rushmore would have gotten a 5 if it were in the BackLOG, I think it fair to give Darjeeling Limited 7 dustbusters out of 10. If you don’t like Wes Anderson, you still won’t. If you tolerate him, you’ll still be able to after this.