My Favorite Film of 2007

by Danny Fisher

The 80th Annual Academy Awards are this Sunday, the 24th. I’m sure I’ll watch. I usually do. This year, among the Best Picture nominees, I’m rooting for Tony Gilroy’s sublime, moving Michael Clayton, which I wrote about last year in this post. (That said, I’ll be pleased when Joel and Ethan Coen’s bleak but absolutely magnificent No Country for Old Men inevitably wins the prize.) My most favorite film of 2007 was completely ignored by the Academy, however. For me, though, nothing else last year compared with it. It has really stayed with me. The film? Wes Anderson’s “emotional comedy” The Darjeeling Limited.

Starring Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman, with an eclectic supporting cast that includes Anjelica Huston, Irfan Khan, Swiss director Barbet Schroeder, Natalie Portman, former Simpsons writer/producer Wallace Wolodarsky, and Bill Murray, the film is co-written (with Schwartzman and Roman Coppola) and directed by Anderson, who also made Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The story of three estranged and self-absorbed brothers on a forced “spiritual journey” through India via the eponymous railway, The Darjeeling Limited plays almost like an elongated short film, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron. (It’s probably no coincidence that Anderson created the actual short film Hotel Chevalier, about one brother’s crumbling relationship, to accompany the film.)

There are many things I love about the movie. I think it’s the best film about siblings that I’ve seen since Kenneth Lonergan’s unmissable You Can Count On Me. The Darjeeling Limited is incredibly insightful about the ways siblings communicate (or don’t) with one another. The film’s performances are also truly spectacular. Brody, Schwarztman, and especially Wilson are extremely affecting; these are sad and often infuriating characters, but you really care about them. And the film is very, very funny, with more heart than any of Anderson’s films since Rushmore. By working smaller than, say, The Royal Tenenbaums, he’s able to go a lot deeper.

At the time of its release, the film received mostly positive reviews, with some detractors here and there. Some complained about the way the movie tells its story (which I see as being like the way short films tend to tell their stories). Roger Ebert offers a thoughtful reply to this line of thinking:

    …The movie meanders. It will therefore inspire reviews complaining that it doesn’t fly straight as an arrow at its target. But it doesn’t have a target, either. Why do we have to be the cops and enforce a narrow range of movie requirements? Anderson is like Dave Brubeck, who I’m listening to right now. He knows every note of the original song, but the fun and genius come in the way he noodles around.

Others complain that the film is too much like Anderson’s previous efforts, what with its focus on broken homes and guarded souls. Peter Travers has their number:

    The dumb rap against the gifted Wes Anderson is that his comedies all hit on similar themes of broken dreams and shattered families. Damn him. And damn Hitchcock for his obsession with suspense. And what’s with Scorsese and violence? My point is, an artist can spend a satisfying lifetime developing personal themes and deepening their resonance.

Lisa Schwarzbaum adds to this, writing:

    This is familiar psychological as well as stylistic territory for Anderson after Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. But there’s a startling new maturity in Darjeeling, a compassion for the larger world that busts the confines of the filmmaker’s miniaturist instincts. (A jolting, unironic plot turn may even shock.)

I confess that I was probably bound to respond strongly to The Darjeeling Limited. I can certainly relate to the young American seekers in India thing. And, as a chaplain, I was delighted by the fact that the film revolves around what Schwarzbaum amusingly (but accurately) refers to as a sort of “rolling family-therapy experiment.” If I have any complaint about the film, it might be the way India is depicted. Carina Chocano is right-on when she says:

    The India of the movie is more an idea than a reality, a whimsical Western projection that combines elements from 1930s picture books, films by Jean Renoir and Satyajit Ray, the Beatles’ immersion in Eastern religion in the ’60s, and centuries of Orientalism. Exotic, spiritual and, according to Peter Whitman (Adrien Brody), “spicy”-smelling, it’s a magical mystery place where wayward foreigners can go to get their souls back on track.

Anderson, though, has taken such an approach in past films with other locations, such as private school and New York City. This blending of diverse influences and creation of a more fanciful location is kind of his aesthetic. I’m inclined, then, to give him a pass on the contrived India of The Darjeeling Limited, with the caveat that he might have made just as interesting a film (if not moreso) by meeting India on its own terms.

Anyway, I’ve gone on long enough about this. I think The Darjeeling Limited is a really wonderful film, and I encourage you to check it out if you haven’t already seen it. It comes out on video this Tuesday, the 26th. The trailer is below.