I kept telling a friend he had to see The Darjeeling Limited, because he works as a train conductor and I knew he’d get a kick out of Wes Anderson’s deliciously quirky style. He recently watched it, so that was my cue to plop down on my couch and savor this film once again for myself, delighting in seeing it through my friend’s eyes, or trying to.
An aside: I haven’t yet developed a “Top 10 Favorite Movies” list, but this may be on it. In competition with The Royal Tenenbaums, I think The Darjeeling Limited is my favorite Wes Anderson film.
Like a great book, each time returning to it is a new experience. There were plenty of scenes I had forgotten. It was awesome to see Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman—beautiful actors—play brothers and follow such a tight, emotionally penetrating, often hilarious script. “Did I raise us?” Owen’s character Francis asks his two younger brothers from across the train table, leaving inadequate time for them to respond before jumping up from his seat to ask the steward for a power adaptor. Like so many great moments in art, the profound is juxtaposed with—yet inextricable from—the mundane.
Francis is the organized, responsible leader who’s been conditioned to conceal his inner chaos, common for an eldest child. Peter (Brody) is the melancholic middle child, often unsure of his place and purpose yet stronger and more capable than he imagines himself to be, and Jack (Schwartzman) is the baby, a constant witness to the shenanigans of his older siblings who nevertheless asserts his individuality—often furtively and rebelliously. “I’ll be right back,” he says suddenly, leaving scenes when the emotional charge between his older brothers runs high and he needs reprieve.
The birth-order trope of course evokes the invisible characters who loom large in the background: the parents. Dad has died and Mom is still existentially present but physically and emotionally departed. Qualms flare between siblings as to who is whose favorite and who will inherit what. By the end of the film, however, the strengthened bonds between the brothers suggest an equality and solidarity in brotherhood that transcends the limitations and failures of the parents.
We think about our lives when we watch the characters’ lives play out on screen. I certainly thought of my own siblings and parents. At other moments, we as viewers are jerked out of our own reflections by the sheer beauty and artistry of the scenes. One such scene that struck me last night was when the brothers get kicked off the train and are left in the desert at night. Around a bonfire, they pass around their leftover bottles of airline liquor and “get high” on Indian sedatives. They each grasp a sturdy, burning torch as they exchange heartfelt words. The vast, dark, desert sky presses in around them. Debussy’s “Claire de Lune” emanates as the soundtrack.
Wes Anderson may be a master of what I’ll call tasteful kitsch (an oxymoron, I know). A scene like this, while so unrepresentative of reality and so glaring in its artistry, shears off all of reality’s trappings and cuts straight to the heart of things. The truth is often beautiful but too cluttered by reality to see. Scenes like this bring us back to the source.
As long as I’m veering into sentimental territory myself, I’ll end this post with a final reflection on the scene that always flashes in my mind when I think of this film. In fact, it’s never when I’m actively thinking of this movie that I think of the scene; it’s when I’m pondering my life as a whole that this scene comes to mind.
Almost the final scene, the brothers have to catch a train out of the place where they have just visited their mother. They’ve just made it to the platform with all their luggage, but the train takes off without them. They begin to run after the train, strapped with all their baggage. They realize they need to let go of the luggage, to release all that weight in order to run fast enough to catch the train. So they do… and they catch it, victoriously. (Sorry for spoils!)
If this scene isn’t a metaphor for my life—and many of our lives, I’m sure—then I don’t know what is. So many times I’ve felt like the kid who clings fiercely to the “known,” to my own narratives, who tries to control my fate with each stride, only to find out that the train hasn’t waited for me and I have to run like hell—to sprint with desperation and abandon—to catch it. Life is a leaving train. To catch it, we must drop our weights: what we thought we knew, who we thought we were, where we thought we were headed. We have to put aside our pride and chase after it.
I’ve been that person so many times, the one who chances missing the train but makes it in the end, fresh out of breath, disconcerted but relieved as hell… Maybe even victorious. I love this movie for many reasons but especially for capturing this feeling.