To skip straight to images and audio from the NYFF press conference for The Darjeeling Limited, click the “Read More” link at the bottom of the page.

The plot of Wes Anderson’s fifth feature concerns the misadventures of Jack, Francis and Peter, three 30-something brothers who gather on a train in India. It’s been twelve months since they last met, at their father’s funeral. They’ve been brought together by Francis (Owen Wilson), who, in the intervening year, almost killed himself in a motorcycle accident; he arrives on the train with his head bandaged like he’s had a lobotomy. Jack (Jason Schwartzman) is fresh off a self-destructive tryst in a Paris hotel room with an ex-girlfriend; he’s grown a George Harrison mustache but walks around barefoot, like Paul McCartney on the cover of Abbey Road. Peter is about to be a dad for the first time; he insists on wearing his late father’s prescription sunglasses, even though they give him tension headaches.

All three are heavily medicated, trading black market Indian opiates at the dinner table before soup is served. Francis first tells Peter and Jack that they’re in India to reestablish their brotherly bonds by visiting a number of “spiritual places,” an itinerary which has Jack planning to jet off to Italy at the first snag. Francis then reveals that they’re actually on their way to find their mother, who is living in a convent in the Himalayas and who, for reasons unknown, failed to show up at their father’s funeral.

Wes Anderson. Photo by Karina Longworth.

Because it’s a Wes Anderson movie, The Darjeeling Limited often seems to be less about the brothers, their shared grief, and their journey of self-discovery through contemplation of a foreign land, and more about their beautifully designed luggage, the trinkets they surround themselves with, their idiosyncratic vices and oddball personality tics. Anderson still primarily constructs a character by putting an actor in a costume, still illustrates a life by ticking off the decorative stuff in it. Brody’s character is the least adorned, and thus, the least compelling.

It’s this kind of style-as-substance that has earned Anderson a lot of flack over the years, but I’ve come to the point where I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to fault the guy for pursuing his balls-out personal vision. And though the quirk factor of that vision can be grating, Darjeeling’s DNA is more in line with the sentimental glamour of Margot Tenenbaum’s furs, and less with the antiseptic affectation of Steve Zissou’s nautical suit. Watching the feature, for me, often felt like being welcomed back into the embrace of an old friend.

There’s still a lot of so-what to the proceedings, but through two fantastic sequences (neither of which take place in the movie’s present tense, nor on the rail vehicle from which the film derives its name), Anderson reveals what he’s really up to, and, in so doing, confirms the knockout filmmaking he’s capable of. One of these sequences occurs late in the film: it’s a dramatization of a story typewritten on hotel stationary by Jack and passed to his brothers earlier in the film. Because all of Jack’s stories are barely-veiled autobiography, it’s also a flashback, to the brothers’ last meeting before India. This sequence works beautifully as an anchor to the past, perhaps the first and certainly the most significant gesture Anderson’s ever made towards the idea that his characters’ eccentricities are temporary, post-traumatic conditions.

The other sequence is not technically even in the film–it’s Hotel Chevalier, the 13-minute short sketching that aforementioned Parisian tryst, that has preceded the feature at festival screenings. At the press conference following Thursday’s NYFF press screening of Darjeeling, Anderson explained that he is attracted to the idea of the viewer seeing the short and the feature in random sequence. He’s the director, so that’s his prerogative, but I think the idea of dismembering the short from the feature–and essentially assigning the audience homework in order to fully participate in the film–is absolute insanity. In my mind, there’s no question that Hotel Chevalier should have been the first scene of The Darjeeling Limited–it’s that essential to the enjoyment of Darjeeling as an epic, and it’s that good. In fact, I would have far preferred to have seen parallel shorts centered around Francis and Peter than the feature’s current, we-gotta-get-Bill-Murray-on-the-payroll-one-way-or-another opening sequence. Intriguingly, Anderson hinted that the short may be “worked in” to the feature at some point during its theatrical run, and the two will definitely be reunited on the DVD.

Jason Schwartzman. Photo by Karina Longworth.

Gripes aside, the two things those sequences have in common (aside from pure artistry on a level superior to the rest of the picture) is that they both serve to illustrate events that Jack will at one point adapt into a story. That is, if they’re not, as I’m inclined to believe, illustrations of the stories themselves, imbued with Jack’s romantic, youngest-sibling point of view. As such, they seem to be the key to the enterprise as a whole.

“We wanted the movie to be very personal,” Anderson said at the press conference on Thursday, describing the process of writing the script with Schwartzman and Roman Coppola. “Anytime we had the question, ‘What happens next?’, we just tried to ask each other ‘Well, what has happened to you, that could relate to this?’ That was our theory of how we were going to approach the movie.”

If The Darjeeling Limited is the intimate scrapbook of its makers, Jack’s stories are the spine. It’s no wonder, then, that these two segments seem like the most vital chunks of the movie: they’re the two spots where process and product really come together. Schwartzman is the soul of the film, and there’s a neat symmetry between his presence here and his work in Anderson’s second feature, Rushmore. Darjeeling and Rushmore are seemingly Anderson’s most personal, borderline-confessional works, and working through Schwartzman as an alter-ego seems to recharge Anderson’s ability to marry pitch-perfect style to emotional honesty.

Adrien Brody and Roman Coppola. Photo by Karina Longworth.

Below, you’ll find an audio clip from the press conference, in which Wes Anderson discusses the importance of the short film and the reasons for keeping it separate from the feature, how his working relationship with Schwartzman has evolved in the nine years since they made Rushmore, and how, in making Darjeeling, he avoided some of the “insurmountable problems” that plagued his last feature, The Life Aquatic.

 

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