If you’ve ever heard the phrase, “The journey is the destination,” then you will already be familiar with the idea behind Wes Anderson’s 2007 film, The Darjeeling Limited. A year after their father’s death, three grown brothers, played in descending age order by Owen Wilson (wearing an elaborate head bandage for most of the film), Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman, reunite for a train trip across India, the destination of which is purposefully unclear. Each brother seems to be battling drugs and depression, not to mention interpersonal issues of a colorful variety. The eldest, Francis, despite being the most visibly battered, is the would-be paternal surrogate of the bunch, snatching up his brothers’ passports to prevent them from straying too far, and conveying an annoyingly methodical itinerary of activities, stop-offs, and sleeping assignments. Peter, the middle brother, has a pregnant wife at home who drifts in and out of his consciousness, a hole he tries to fill by purchasing various living and non-living paraphernalia in village bazaars along the way. The youngest and quietest, Jack, strikes up a passionate romance with one of the train’s stewardesses, which runs its course with alarming rapidity.
The first few scenes of the film show the brothers in tension. They resist and resent each other, sulk and regret, dig up the petty and the trivial for sport, and argue over their father’s love. But deep down the brothers are not all that different. As ever in the world of Wes Anderson, siblings are intended as varying manifestations of a single unit — the family — that has fallen into a state of disrepair. The brothers are in one sense separate beings in conflict with each other, and in another sense three versions of an aggravated whole. They have different mannerisms and propensities, but fundamentally they have the same problems, and those problems stem from the same root.
I don’t know if Anderson is religious, but Darjeeling has at least a spiritual feel; it is a journey through grief and reflection. Setting the film in India and filling the soundtrack with Indian ballads seems like a nod to a certain kind of journey desired by affluent westerners in need of a “break,” an “escape,” or a “retreat” — something more than just a “vacation” or a “trip”. In this sense, perhaps the setting of Darjeeling is a critique of those who have too much time and resources to allocate to their mourning process. If getting over the loss of a loved one leaves people with no other choice than to travel across India for several weeks, how could normal people hope to get by?
In any case, the best stories are those that speak from the heart, and this film is somewhat like watching the heart speak to itself. We know early on that the brothers have come to India for a spiritual healing. Healing seems like the last thing they are prepared to do, but then, those are often the types of people who most need it. It may be no mistake that Anderson went to India to shoot this film, or that he included so many references to his idol, Indian film legend Satyajit Ray, or that he harps on familiar — even pat — symbols of healing. There is a strong, permeating conviction, reinforced by Owen Wilson’s character at times, that “we must take this journey.”
Despite the weightiness of this all, Anderson’s filmmaking tends towards the stylistic over the probing. But as in The Royal Tenenbaums, that serves to illuminate the complicated and often absurd nature of family tragedy. Here are three grown men who seem to have never grown up, and for that we are almost inclined to assign them the blame, if it weren’t for the creeping suspicion that their parents did this to them — somehow, some way.
In Tenenbaums, the destructive potential of bad parents was front and center, with a memorable turn from Gene Hackman as the conniving patriarch. And the point was much the same: can we blame a grown Richie Tenenbaum for taking his socks off on the tennis court? In part, but not entirely. In Darjeeling, however, the parents are firmly in the background, and accordingly, we become better acquainted with their effect than their presence. All we know of the father is that he died in a car accident, and it is not until much later that we learn more about the mother, who turns out to be happily ensconced in missionary work in the heart of India, having moved on from the bonds of family and domesticity. The brothers, once pathetic, now seem sympathetic by contrast.
Parents are savage and children are lame, and what a rousing disappointment the family can turn out to be. That’s Anderson’s point, more or less, and maybe also the reason for all the self-therapy, both on camera and off. As consolation, healing is available to all of us, if not on a train headed across the Indian countryside, then in the company of those to whom we are inexorably bound. Maybe it is the only possible way of shedding some of our baggage.
Mack Lannahan 