LGM Film Club, Part 526: The Darjeeling Limited
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On Saturday, I had a 14 hour flight from Singapore to Vancouver and so that was a 5 movie flight. Mostly, I watched some old favorites. Air Canada has an amazing number of films to stream, which was great. But I was curious–how would The Darjeeling Limited hold up over time? It’s not considered among Wes Anderson’s best films generally, but I always did love that soundtrack, largely borrowed from the films of Satyajit Ray. I hadn’t seen it since the theaters.
The answer is that it does not hold up very well. Often, the critique of this film–and this is fair–is that Anderson used India as a background for three fucked up white guys to have their spiritual rediscovery without having the first thing to say about India or portraying it with any realism. That’s true, but I’m going to let that go because I don’t expect documentary footage or meaningful political commentary from Wes Anderson. It’s not necessary for every film to reinforce our political predilections or to have a politics at all (though I fully grant you that not having a politics is a very political choice).
But even given that, the film doesn’t work for two reasons. The first is that Anderson was trying to make an emotionally meaningful film and he’s just not good at that. He learned from that and went all-in on his aesthetic in the years after this, which he is good at. He just can’t pull off directing real emotion. Second, the casting is a mess. The problem is that Adrien Brody is a real actor who does real actor things, such as showing the ability to pull off actual emotion. The reason that’s a problem is that Anderson surrounded him with Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson, neither of whom can act at all. Those guys fit his films so much better than Brody for this reason–he doesn’t actually want you to act. He wants you to fit into the aesthetic.
So the film largely fails. It’s enjoyable enough as a lark though and I feel bad for Brody being hamstrung with those guys.
In other news and speaking of my flight home from Asia, why had no one ever told me that there were free Ms. Pac-Man machines to play in the Montreal airport?