I have two questions about The Darjeeling Limited.

1) Did Wes Anderson grow up in a diorama?

2) Why no downers and whiskey for the audience?

Never mind.

Anderson's movies need no introduction. Or explanation. He seems to pride himself on bringing neatly polished, pompous shit disguised as "personal" films to theatres.

You know all of the characters- Big Nose, Big Fucked-up Nose, Emaciated Brit, Ma Addams, Dr. Venkman, Midget Indian... and The Kinks. They're all here. And as per usual none of them make any sense. Also as usual all speak plainly but without a point. All are either staring like Jack Nicholson after his lobotomy in One flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and/or are singing melancholy shit in some way or another throughout. To wit: all are fucked up badly, with the main three being both literally (on booze, pills, drops) and emotionally (daddy died, mommy became a nun, one tried suicide) screwed. And all are on the run.

In slow motion.

Through India.

On a train.

Because that's just the type of place you go to when you're running away in slow motion. If you are filthy-rich and are white, that is. You go to the subcontinent in life-sucking slo- mo on a train where leather-skinned people can, by simple physical contrast or by dying the death of the pathetically poor, help you to legitimize your pain and bring out The Great White Pathos within. And a train is how you get there when you are trapped in slo-mo inside a Wes Anderson shitfest. A smelly-ass train, with a hot stewardess, all the painkillers and booze you can stand and no clue as to where it is all going. Not even the train knows where.

It actually gets lost at one point which, in the context of a Wes Anderson movie, makes perfect sense. It is a spot-on analogy, a train lost on rails, to what the audience is experiencing- i.e. a meticulously crafted trip to Nowheresville. If Anderson spent half as much time elucidating, even obliquely, some of the main character's inner beings (that is the meat of the would-be story here, I am guessing) as he does cultivating every nuance of Rushmore's facial hair and The Gaunt One's eye movements, we might have something. Instead, a heretofore hardly mentioned Bill Murray, Natalie Portman... and a fucking tiger show up in a last minute montage that succeeds in taking a film that is apparently about the gayest set of travel luggage ever produced and turning it into something even less thoughtful. By introducing us to these passing images (which are supposedly related to a fleshed-out version of the story the filmmakers thought contained far too much of potential interest to spectators to put on actual film), Anderson says, "Here. Eat your fucking scraps. You want a real movie? Well, then I guess you should have thought of that BEFORE not being born a Wilson..."

But really, who wants anything from these clowns? Big Fucked Up Nose tried to go deep with Private Benjamin's daughter...and LOST. Someone who loses the will to live over Penny Lane might not be the guy you want to hear deep thoughts from regarding the human condition. Hair conditioner, maybe.

In the end, The Darjeeling Limited amounts to a pile of babytalk set in a series of enlarged dioramas which frame the human condition as effectively as pea-green brings out the best in bathroom fixtures. It panders to pussies, trust-funders, man-children, and people addicted to booze and pain killers...and it needs to be derailed.

--michael3b