My Three Stooges

The Darjeeling Limited Directed by Wes Anderson

“Maybe we can express ourselves best if we say it without words,” a character suggests in The Darjeeling Limited. That deliberate paradox triggers one of the movie’s most beautiful passages: A brief montage filling in the story of three wealthy, white American brothers “on a spiritual journey” in India. It details their individual, private moments. The loneliness they can’t express to each other; episodes lifted out of time. This sequence’s poignancy and whirling momentum connects each brother’s life to someone else’s—and to the universe—spiritually.

It’s a supremely cinematic sequence. Wes Anderson shows—without words—what makes these characters recognizably human. Older brother Francis Whitman (Owen Wilson), a remorseful adventurer who has wrecked his face and body doing death-defying stunts, has summoned his far-flung brothers, Peter (Adrien Brody), whose marriage is in trouble, and Jack (Jason Schwartzman), a short-story writer with a compulsive, panicky sex life. They reunite and make a pilgrimage in honor of their recently deceased father. (It’s a post-Christian hope to reincarnate the family unit.) Anderson shows them on board the Darjeeling Limited, a bright blue luxury train with a sleeper car that crosses the sandy subcontinent. While this expressive montage singles out each person in a compartment, Anderson looks beyond their isolation; he harmonizes their mournful,  coping temperaments.

Movies about family trauma may be Anderson’s thematic specialty. He understands that families have a specific energy that (pace Tolstoy) makes them unique. And The Darjeeling Limited is a uniquely peripatetic family-trauma film, like John Ford’s little-known 1938 Four Men and a Prayer. Humor didn’t always work for Ford, but with Anderson’s very modern sensibility—coming after Ford’s and TV’s “My Three Sons”—the Whitmans’ travails provide a sensible slant on both social privilege and family pieties. In his bemusement, Anderson is able to respect the fragile nature of family relations even as he observes them in eccentric situations.

The Darjeeling Limited condenses the comic worldview already familiar from Anderson’s previous films. They respectively suggested satirical versions of Renoir’s beneficence (Bottle Rocket), Salinger’s neuroses (Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums) and Spielberg’s megalomania (The Life Aquatic)—all to a British Invasion beat. But this time Anderson adds a plangent self-consciousness that hails a different pop influence. The title metaphor of The Darjeeling Limited converts Fellini’s road-of-life metaphor in La Strada into the train itself (it’s an Orient Express seen through Anderson’s storybook wonderment). It also tracks “the road of life” that is the actual translation of Satyajit Ray’s classic Pather Panchali (the first film of The Apu Trilogy; Anderson uses Ray’s movie scores as part this film’s soundtrack).

Yet, for all this, The Darjeeling Limited is more than a movie-buff’s grabbag, like Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Instead, the film’s premiere at this week’s New York Film Festival reaffirms the importance of a filmmaker’s personal sensibility—an often-forgotten essence in contemporary film culture.

Casual moviegoers might grumble that Anderson’s vision is “quirky” and doesn’t allow for the mass hypnosis of self-reflexive trash like Superbad or Ocean’s Thirteen. But The Darjeeling Limited is so reflective of personal experience (within the context of rarefied pop antecedents) that it returns common emotional power to today’s fragmented, disingenuous popular culture. Even if you don’t catch Anderson’s many sly cultural references, you can sense their quality of feeling. You understand without putting it in words because all of it is uncannily filtered through an understanding of family life.

The way Francis takes the leader position over his younger brothers (prompting both their forbearance and their resentment) is remarkably authentic—they even have similarly protruding noses. Francis, Peter and Jack clown their way through India, indulging the family hypochondria as well as the shared trait of broadminded cultural openness (“I love the way this country smells,” Peter says). Their roughhousing antics suggest The Three Stooges ingeniously used to echo the private dynamics and sense of mortality of a Chekhov play. Anderson co-wrote the script with the cousins Schwartzman (Talia Shire’s son) and Roman Coppola (Francis Ford’s son, whose marvelous underrated film CQ was a remarkable mesh of family love and movie lore).

When the Whitman brothers argue to establish dominance (“There’s been too much Indian-giving over the years!” “Those are Dad’s glasses!”), it proves extremely affecting. So does Francis’s wondering why Peter never seeks his confidence. “What doesn’t he want me to know?” he asks, and Jack informs him, “We don’t trust each other.” This is heartbreaking. Any family-tied moviegoer will intuit that Jack refers to the uncertain desire for forgiveness. That’s always the overarching objective of Anderson’s human comedy.

Wes-ophiles will enjoy this film’s musical messages: that “unspoken” montage scored to The Rolling Stones’ “Play With Fire,” the family excursion that evokes “Dear Prudence” and The Beatles’ fabled pilgrimage to India. But everyone should appreciate the film’s emotional and visual glow. Robert Yeoman’s cinemascope imagery, with lateral pans and upward tilts, really is ebullient—the most humane movie vision since Nacho Libre. How wonderful is all this? Well, The Darjeeling Limited starts audaciously—with a bonus: a 10-minute short about Jack’s disturbing love life. The full-length feature that follows is a deeply charming comedy, yet it never shakes off Anderson’s intimations of loss, desperation and longing. It could be re-titled Three Stooges and a Prayer.