'Darjeeling': too lightweight for a heavyweight

By Mina Hochberg | amNewYork Movie Critic

2:48 PM EDT, September 27, 2007

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Rating: "The Darjeeling Limited" is named after a train that three brothers (Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman and Adrien Brody) take on an ostensible spiritual journey through India.

As always, director Wes Anderson creates a rich, magnificent universe that stays mainly on the train, but also stretches into Indian temples and desert villages. From the luggage to the tea cups, he tends lovingly to the props and sets of each scene with his hand-drawn motifs and a serene color scheme of cornflower blue and golden yellow.

The lavishness of all this detail makes you feel the brothers' depression all the more keenly. The reasons for their gloom are various -- an ex-girlfriend, a fear of commitment -- but are ultimately rooted in one common source: their absent mother (Anjelica Huston) and a recently deceased father.

Typical Anderson protagonists like to cozy up in intimate quarters such as submarines, tents and, in this case, the train cabin. They curl up figuratively and metaphorically in the cocoon of their repressed issues, emerging slowly as the film walks them through the steps of maturity. Yet in "Darjeeling," the characters are trapped for too long in their existential cocoons. "Why wasn't mom ever there for us?" is the question behind each emotional beat. That question, which pops up frequently in Anderson's movies, is a turn-off.

The helplessness and lost-puppy eyes that Wilson, Schwartzman and Brody bring to their roles is absolutely endearing, and they bicker and tussle with the same hilarious immaturity of other Anderson man-boys like Bill Murray in "Rushmore" or Gene Hackman in "The Royal Tenenbaums." But these man-boys need a stern, sane figure to drag them out of their funk, and that figure doesn't emerge until it's too late, when they track down their mother-turned-nun at the very end.

The film is a visual treat, but it's in an awkward limbo: too melancholy to be much fun yet too whimsical to be taken seriously.

The Darjeeling Limited. Directed by Wes Anderson; written by Anderson, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman; starring Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston Amara Karan.