The Darjeeling Limited (2007) Wes Anderson’s Problem Play (Review)

You may not think of Wes Anderson fandom as a rough-and-tumble affair, but I’ve seen violent gang brawls – Louis Vuitton satchels thrown in anger, men savagely beaten with their own powder-blue loafers – erupt over the issue of what the Texan director’s worst film is. For me, it’s his Indian train odyssey The Darjeeling Limited and its sibling short Hotel Chevalier, co-written with Roman Coppola and his regular leading man Jason Schwartzman. Anderson’s prior film, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, received the most tepid initial response of his career – but I loved it, and unhesitatingly went to bat for its defence. Why did I then feel so let down by his next adventure? A typically well-curated Criterion UK Blu-Ray offered me a chance to find out.

The Darjeeling Limited undoubtedly improves on a second viewing. Like everything by Wes Anderson, it is a film of perfectly calibrated details, and a rewatch at least allows you to pick a few more up. “Luftwaffe Automobiles” is a fine addition to his catalogue of not-quite-right business names, and he manages to make ‘Claire de Lune’ sound so fresh you’d think no soundtrack had ever used it before. He deploys his regulars well: Schwartzman’s resemblance to all of the Beatles at once feels very apt in an ashram setting, and Owen Wilson’s performance as Francis might be his best. The newcomers, too, fit in perfectly. Amara Karan should have become an Anderson regular; Adrien Brody did.

It’s also the case that some of the criticism Anderson was receiving at the time has been proven wrong. The increasing levels of stylisation and artifice across his first four films led some to the conclusion that he was becoming increasingly superficial and flashy, distracted from true human emotion by his huge dolls’-house sets. This is bunk, I’ve argued before that it’s bunk, and the universal acclaim doled out to the extremely stylised, extremely heartfelt Grand Budapest Hotel should put this argument permanently in the grave. What is perturbing about The Darjeeling Limited is the sense that Anderson might have been listening to those critics. One of the film’s running gags is Francis’s obsessive micro-managing of every detail of their supposedly liberating, spiritual Indian trip. A few interviewers asked the director if this was a self-portrait, an idea he batted away, but even so, the film clearly represents a concerted effort to get Anderson and cinematographer Robert Yeoman’s famously precise style into more messy, real-world locations.

It doesn’t not work, and the best bits are the ones that impose Anderson’s visual scheme on unmistakably real locations. The market scene, which any other Western director would film as a cliched hand-held melee, is shot as a moving tableau from a distance. It reminds you that cinematic style, at its best, is not an affectation – it’s a way to see the world through someone else’s eyes, and it can result in remarkably original work. The film suffers from a lack of more moments like this. To return to The Grand Budapest Hotel, that is a film about dictatorship and young love, profound grief and Wildean flippancy, slapstick chase comedy and brutal murder. It shouldn’t hold together, but Anderson’s style is so strong that you never doubt that this all belongs in the same story. The Darjeeling Limited has a similarly wayward script, but the style isn’t strong enough to prevent tonal whiplash. It begins as a light Americans-abroad comedy, veers without warning into extremely grave tragedy and ends up – via a long flashback that feels like it started out as another short film – basically as The Mughal Tenenbaums.

That tragedy, by the way, involves a non-speaking Indian character, which brings us to the other common criticism of The Darjeeling Limited: that it focuses on white Americans rather than the people who actually live in the country Anderson is aestheticizing. I’ve never really known what Anderson is meant to do in this situation: his critics would agree that he isn’t equipped to make a film set in India about Indians, so perhaps he just shouldn’t make a film set in a foreign country at all? Except “artists should stick to their own country and race” doesn’t sound like much of a progressive point to me. I do enjoy the depth of cinematic knowledge Anderson arrives in other countries with – I’d kill for him to make a film in the UK – but in truth, I found The Darjeeling Limited‘s depiction of Indians more bothersome than anything in Isle of Dogs. The later film’s decision not to subtitle Japanese dialogue might seem othering on paper, but I never felt like I didn’t understand and relate to its Japanese characters as a result. In The Darjeeling Limited, the nearest thing to a vaguely definable Indian character is Amara Karan’s Rita, and even then her character is “person Jason Schwartzman is having sex with”.

Schwartzman’s Jack is a self-pitying womaniser who mutters “I want that stewardess” on first seeing Rita, and whose character arc involves him learning to become a better writer by treating women like shit. He might just be the most dislikeable character in Anderson’s back catalogue, which seems absurd on its face – doesn’t Royal Tenenbaum make racist remarks towards Henry Sherman? Doesn’t Steve Zissou use anti-gay slurs? And Gustave H makes him look like an amateur at casual sex… but it’s not the sex that’s the problem. The Grand Budapest Hotel allows us space to decide how we feel about M. Gustave’s tendency to “go to bed with all my friends”, and Royal and Steve grow and show contrition over their more serious character flaws. The Darjeeling Limited, though, is meant to prove Anderson can do emotion, and so we constantly feel jostled into caring for Jack. Symbols and character beats that Anderson would ordinarily leave unstressed are triple-underlined – Francis even says “Is that symbolic?” after a particularly thumping metaphor – and we are intended to invest in Jack’s battle to regain his writing mojo. I ended up thinking the film would be significantly improved if Act Two’s tragedy involved him being crushed to death under the wheels of the titular train, although you’d then have the problem of persuading the audience this was a bad thing.

Perhaps I was simply prepared for it this time, but Jack was easier to take on a revisit. This might be because I chose not to precede it with Hotel Chevalier, as it was at my cinema screening. Not only does the short film mess up the neat bookending of the main feature – frankly, the opening cameo from Bill Murray feels like a much better supporting short anyway – it also offers a dose of Jack unleavened by his less detestable brothers. It begins with Jack listening over and over to the worst song of the 1960s (‘Where Do You Go To, My Lovely?’) and continues with him being rude, callous and charmless to a woman who then has sex with him anyway. I usually find the polymorphous sexuality and matter-of-fact nudity in Anderson’s films quite sweet, but the balance is deeply off here. Perhaps it’s too distracting when it involves an actress (Natalie Portman) who’s been relentlessly objectified since she was literally a child, and who was shaken by the drooling reaction to her only nude scene here. Criterion’s disc, a beautifully-designed thing as ever, offers you the chance to watch The Darjeeling Limited with or without Hotel Chevalier; I was grateful for the option, although I would be more impressed if it somehow offered you the chance to never, ever watch the short.

Often accused of being pretentious, the Style Council chose to face down these allegations in 1987 by promoting their album The Cost of Loving with a non-linear musical satire on British identity in the age of Thatcherism, narrated by a pre-Reverend Richard Coles. Surprisingly, this did not stop people from calling them pretentious, and the resulting film JerUSAlem (it is our sad duty to confirm that yes, you saw what they did there) vanished from sight.

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Thanks for reading Graham’s review of Darjeeling Limited

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