Spoilers, people, spoilers.
Sorry for the late posting and lack of a FRT. I slept in a little for once, since we went to the midnight premiere last night of The Darjeeling Limited, a movie that caused a lot of “yes, but” reactions in me. The movie sets out to cover the same territory as The Royal Tenebaums, basically how having everything handed to you on a platter can cause people to think they’re the center of the universe, creating in turn a spiritual emptiness, a total lack of grip. This movie was better than Tenebaums, because he made the case that this is true much better. However, he used a lot of teeth-gratingly obvious symbolism at times so the audience didn’t miss the point, which seems like it might be a real threat with a lot of Wes Anderson fans who appear to think his movies are about being mega-quirky and nothing more.
The movie flows really well, though, and in no small part because the three main actors all turn in amazing performances of three brothers who have lived such a life of pampered privilege that, when their father dies, they have basically no internal resources with which to handle it and grieve, and fracture apart, taking solace in separate lives of self-aggrandizing bullshit. I usually find Owen Wilson irritating, but he’s good in this movie like he was in Meet the Parents, because he plays un-self-aware, self-aggrandizing assholes to a T. Jason Schwartzman is solid as the youngest brother, the one who quite possibly is the worst of the three in creating overdramatic problems for himself (involving women, of course) to cope. Adrian Brody is the middle brother, the one who’s had a glimpse of reality and wants to run away. The three try to find some grounding in a boutique “spiritual” tour of India, one-stop-shopping for spiritual wholeness, complete with laminated itineraries and instructions on going through the motions of prayer at all the temples they stop at.
Anderson makes absolutely sure the audience dislikes these three, despite the fact that the actors themselves are likeable. They’re petulant and shallow, brag about how much money they have and how they casually globe-trot, wander around poverty-stricken India like kings, are casually misogynist, and ungrateful for people’s kindnesses to them. They’re also intellectually incurious about the religion they’re supposedly in India to learn about, a trait which is played with more subtle humor than I would have suspected it. In sum, they’re the absolute epitome of the Ugly American, and I kept hoping they’d get robbed and all their dozen suitcases laden with overpriced goods stolen from them.
Then the brothers come across three young boys crossing a river on a raft that dumps over, sending them into the rapids. They jump in, save the lives of two, but Brody’s character loses his grip on the third boy who dies, in a meaningless accident meant to echo the one that killed their father. They bring the two living children and one dead one to their father, and spend the next day in this rural village where they don’t share a language with anyone, but they’re taken to the funeral for the boy because they tried to save his life. It’s an interesting interlude, because they’re on the outside looking in at another family suffering the same fate theirs did. It’s ambiguous, but my read on it was it drove home the fact that accidental death doesn’t have a greater meaning, and their sense that their father’s death must be meaningful came from their own view of themselves as Very Important People. But this death showed them that death is random, meaningless, and unjust, and most importantly, not about them. It just happens.
I thought it was well-played in certain ways, but Anderson has a narrative conundrum—how to make the point that the world doesn’t revolve around these three people when the movie itself does? Well, I don’t envy anyone who has to figure that out, but Anderson fumbles during the funeral scene, by keeping the camera firmly on his three main actors for most of the funeral, cutting away to show what’s going on during the funeral, and right back on them for reactions. And it’s this sort of misstep that makes his movies so maddening. He has a firm intellectual understanding of the problems of wealth and privilege, but he can’t set aside an emotional infatuation with the idea that the wealthy are more interesting and important than you or me, even as the plot turns and character touches scream that he’s attempting to say otherwise.
Anderson’s critiques of how all too often men forget that women are human, with independent thoughts, motivations, and lives, suffers from the same sense that he doesn’t quite believe what he knows intellectually. This movie has an echo of one of the central conflicts in Rushmore (with the same actor, Jason Schwartzman!) running across a woman who he immediately objectifies, projecting all sorts of his hopes and desires onto her, only to hit a brick wall of discovering that she’s not actually a cipher, but a real human being with her own agenda. Great idea, deserves to be explored some, but ends up being tacked into this movie. For all that there’s the Big Reveal that Amara Karan is just using Schwartzman for her own purposes as much as he’s using her for his—and she’s much more clear-headed about it—we don’t learn enough about her to really care. She’s not a cipher, the movie says, while using her as a cipher. Again, it’s a sticky issue that’s hard to get around, since she’s a minor character in a navel-gazing movie, and thus almost has to be a cipher, but it creates a lot of confusion for the audience. It worked a lot better in Rushmore, because the teacher was much more of a central character and had more screen time to develop a personality.
It’s a pretty good movie; if you want to be generous, you could say that the tensions between the meaning you get from the plot and symbolism and the meaning you get from the directing and scripting choices in itself points to how a lot of these issues are daunting and quite possibly impossible to resolve satisfactorily. There are hints that Anderson is projecting his own internal tensions between self-importance and knowing better. Even the ending has this odd tension to it; we don’t really see that the brothers have changed significantly now that they’ve been exposed to information about how the world doesn’t revolve around them, but one of the final shots implies that they desire to shed their insufferable attitudes. It’s left an open question as to whether that’s possible.
12 Responses to “Diffusing self-importance”
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I want to see this movie, but you’ve really encapsulated my problem with Wes Anderson right here. He does the weird, quirky, twitchy stuff really well, but his larger narratives are often too ham-fisted and shallow for me to really enjoy his movies much. In this one, the symbolism of the luggage in particular is just too fucking obvious. Things like that make me feel like I’m being talked down to, which is not why I go to the movies.
All in all, I’d rather watch a Charlie Kaufman film.
Honestly, I just can’t work up the energy to see a movie about entitled whiny brats, even if that’s supposed to be the point.
Although I’m a Wes Anderson fan, Rushmore remains my favorite and the best of his films, in my opinion. With subsequent movies moving increasily toward more quirks and ticks and even less of an emotional center than his first.
Saw a screening of Darjeeling, and the audience did their best to find comedy in it, but the laughter was strained.
Frankly, it seemed an excuse for the Anderson stalwarts to take a trip to India, one of those films where the cast and crew had a blast vacation together, which doesn’t translate into an equally enjoyable experience for the audience.
Mostly, I just thought it was funny and best taken as a light-hearted comedy mocking people’s pretensions. I didn’t even mind the way the funeral scenes focused mostly on the three brothers because when it focused on them, it was to highlight their absurdity, whereas when it focused on the Indian family it was to highlight their very serious grief. Basically I thought it could be summed up as “funny bunch of pretentious twits try to find deeper meaning and fail hilariously, but maybe learn something from the experience anyway.”
My positive feeling as I left the theater may have been influenced by the shirtless and pantsless shots of Adrien Brody, however.
And as I re-read my comment I realize that it might be taken as dismissive of the stuff Amanda points out, like someone saying “it was just a joke!” after someone points out privilege. That was not my intent. I don’t disagree with most of what Amanda wrote, I just didn’t even bother giving the film that type of analysis because I wasn’t thinking of it as serious art.
My favorite expression for people like this (keeping in the spirit of the baseball playoffs currently going on) is, “He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.”
I enjoy this expression as well. I find myself using it when I’m trying to explain how much more difficult it is to go to graduate school when you’re mid-thirties, with a full-time professional job and two mortgages to pay than when you’re mid-twenties, have few responsibilities, and have family members paying your credit cards and rent.
My positive feeling as I left the theater may have been influenced by the shirtless and pantsless shots of Adrien Brody, however.
Seriously. I was a diehard Brody fan long before “The Pianist.” Most unconventionally gorgous skinny leading man ever.
Wait, my family is supposed to pay my rent and credit card bills? (I’m 23 and a half-time grad student.) Can I give you my mom’s phone number so you can let her know?
I understand that it’s harder for older folks — I’m in a Library Science program designed for career changers and other older-than-me folks (I’m very literally the youngest person in the program), so I don’t have a chance to forget it. But it’s not all sitting around eating bon-bons for anyone, and plenty of young folks are financially responsible for their own lives.
Oops… that above post about grad students was me, not Grolby. I’m using his computer and forgot, so direct all ire at me, not him.
Damn, I never realized how tiny Jason Schwarzman was. Or how tall Owen Wilson was.
I actually like The Royal Tenembaums better. It had a bit more story fleshed out, and the characters were screwed up, but you still could care for them. I didn’t like Francis (Wilson’s character) he was so obnoxious that when you find out he got into an accident on purpose and lived you sort of wish it had worked out better for him. No, really. With Peter (Brody), you also get annoyed at how callous he was towards his wife (”I was expecting us to get divorced eventually” “I never wanted a baby”), and Jack…. Well, I’m still wondering why the damn man went around barefoot most of the time.
Note I have said nothing about the story, because there really wasn’t much of one. Perhaps a skeleton of one. I’d love to say that The Darjeling Express was a disappointment to me, but I sort of had gone through the disappointment stage with Life Acquatic. Nowaydays I’m sort of starting to come to accept the fact that you don’t really get much more than “a collection of assorted freakish characters go around doing weird things for flimsy reasons” as a plot point in a Wes Anderson movie. At least not until he grows out of whatever phase he is in now. Hopefully.