The Darjeeling Limited

This was certainly better than I thought it'd be, I guess because for some reason I was thinking Wes Anderson was bound to descend into a mid-career slump of crap for a while here... Not sure exactly where I got that idea. But I would say he hasn't exactly entered that phase of his career. Though he has got the point that I don't think he's really trying to figure out anything new; he's just working on perfecting what he's getting at. I'm worried he's getting close to arriving there, and I hope he knows where to go from there.

I'm not sure that I've ever seen a filmmaker aside from Kubrick who can actually control everything that you see in the frame to the extent that Anderson has managed to do at this point in his career. Even things you notice going on in the background have probably been consciously put there by Anderson, or at least taken into account. He goes about as far as it would be possible to go toward separating what he's shooting from reality. It's certainly a feat.

What does it mean that the main characters in this movie are probably the most mature main characters in any of his movies? And is that even true? I think it might be, except for maybe Anjelica Huston in Tenenbaums. It was great to see her pull off her character in this movie, too. There was no way she should have been able to make her character seem even remotely believable, but she ends storming into her scene like she's the only one with anything real going on. Wes Anderson should make a movie with Anjelica Huston as the main character. He owes it to the world. What he manages to get out of her is on a whole other level from everything else he's doing--even his resurrection of Bill Murray. Actually, I think that's a really good idea. Maybe it would allow him to escape from his little world of arrested development that, while certainly unique and interesting and entertaining, gets further and further from seeming like there's actually anything at stake in every film. I probably wouldn't even feel that way about it if it weren't for Anjelica Huston in this movie. But she really did seem more actually compelling than the three brothers during her brief intrusion into the movie.

***
(10/18)

The thing that bothered me the most about this movie, and it's something I tried to articulate to Elliot but that I also admitted to being uncomfortable with (it's a criticism I'm a little uncomfortable having) is the way the movie used the death of the Indian boy to trigger whatever "real" spiritual awakening the three brothers are supposed to have. First of all, it's just such an obvious move: the death of the Indian boy brings them out of themselves so they have to experience something beyond their own self-centered world; except that it's obviously the function of the death of the Indian boy to be that for them, so, for the movie, the death of the boy is just as much about them as everything else. I kept waiting for some moment when the audience would be forced to see the death as something outside of the symbolic world of the three brothers, but the movie never takes that step. I don't think it's just the fact that it's an Indian death triggering a spiritual experience for three white Americans: it's the fact that the narrative is so focused on the three brothers that really nothing outside of them can exist in and of itself, and this fact gives the audience permission to experience the boy's death as something purely functional and symbolic (along with everything else in the movie, of course...) And if a narrative is really nothing more than a creative presentation of thought or thinking, which it is, then this form of thinking encourages the audience to enclose experiences in symbolic trappings. I'm uncomfortable about this criticism because it's such a moralistic critique.