Title: The Darjeeling Limited
Genre: Adventure/Comedy/Drama
Cast: Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, …
Director: Wes Anderson
Release: (2007)
Say, movie fans, did you know that Wes Anderson is esoteric? Because he totally is. It’s okay if you’ve never noticed before – most people aren’t trained to pick up on the kinds of subtleties it might take to notice something like that. But, fortunately for you, I am. And using my extensive background in the field of criticalogical analysis, I’ll do my best to point out for you here some of the very understated ways that this modern-day Dalai Drama shares with us his own unique globo-cultural vision of the world around us in his (for lack of a more appropriately reverential term) films. Of course even with my help, your beer and television stunted brains probably won’t be able to grasp most of the insights this Bohemian mystic has to offer about the fundamental conflict between human narcissism and spiritual isolation, or about the thoroughly superior hipness of foreign language acoustic music to the soul-poisoning, homogenized crap on your iPod, but maybe at least a little something will seep through and allow you to start appreciating the overlooked beauty of the mundane through his unique perspective.
Take The Darjeeling Limited for example. The title alone tells you all you need to know about how sophisticatedly quirky Anderson is. (And if you don’t already know what it means, I couldn’t possibly begin to make you understand in this brief space. Try skipping the Applebee’s 2-for1 happy hour every once in a while and going out for sangria with a few of your closest multiethnic, multigendered, sociopolitical blogger friends at a barefoot Peruvian tapas bar instead and maybe you’ll start to understand these kind of things a little more.) And the story itself is no less recherché. In Darjeeling, we are whisked along with American brothers Francis, Jack and Peter Whitman as they embark on a metaphysical journey of discovery and healing into their own beautifully flawed souls, which is metaphorically encapsulated in the analogous guise of a train ride into the equally beautiful and flawed soul of India. This type of visual corollary to the real, underlying story is a hallmark of Anderson’s art and continues to be employed throughout our journey on the Darjeeling. Like, for example, the excessive baggage that the characters bring with them on the train and lug around with them at virtually every stop along the way. Most of you would probably just say to yourself, “Well that’s silly, couldn’t they have packed more efficiently for such a vacation? Poor planning, there mister. Someone ought to teach those boys how to use a spreadsheet organizer.” But, you see, you’re just looking at the bags through the eyes of a savage (or as we say, an “aren’tist”) as if they represented literal bags, but to someone who sees the world as uniquely as Anderson, that physical baggage is actually intended to represent … emotional baggage! Ahhhhh, do you see it now? Well, some of you will but I’m sure some of you will need a little more time to get your head around that. It’s pretty abstract, but once you see it, it’s like wiping the amniotic goop out of your eyes and opening them for the very first time.
