dir Wes Anderson, scrpl Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola & Jason Schwartzman, cin Robert Yeoman, ed Andrew Weisblum
Patricia Whitman: What happened to your face?
Francis L. Whitman: I smashed into a hill, on purpose, on my motorcycle.
Patricia Whitman: I’m sorry to hear that. There are so many things we don’t know about each other, aren’t there?
There’s a moment in The Darjeeling Unlimited when a perfect storm of Indian muscle relaxants, flu medicine & painkillers, a poisonous cobra and a canister of pepper spray strand the protagonists, the Whitman brothers, in the middle of India. In the hands of a less assured talent, the events that result in the Whitmans’ banishment from their train would have been delivered as a zany slapstick. But Wes Anderson is a more nuanced storyteller than that and, as with his previous films, there is an undercurrent of sadness and longing to the Whitmans’ journey.
The Whitmans are Francis (Wilson), Peter (Brody) and Jack (Schwartzman), who have not talked in a year. Francis claims to have arranged their train travel through India on The Darjeeling Express to reconnect with his siblings, saying, “…I want us to become brothers again like we used to be, and for us to find ourselves and bond with each other.” But he’s also secretly planned a confrontation with their mother (Huston), who is living as a missionary nun, in an effort to find out why she avoided their father’s funeral.
As in Anderson’s previous films, familial dynamics are explored in depth here, with a focus on estrangement and abandonment. In one telling scene, Jack muses aloud, “I wonder if the three of us would've been friends in real life. Not as brothers, but as people,” as if these blood relationships are so fractured that it’s easier, more natural to co-exist with those whom he does not share a genetic bond.
It’s been said that men spend their lives either trying to impress or disavow their fathers. While some of this is evident in how each of the Whitman brothers cope with their father’s death, it’s is their maternal relationships that are more closely analyzed here.
Their reunion with Patricia, their mother, is particularly satisfying because it feels both subtle and remarkably true. It does not force a dramatic and unlikely turn of character. This is not surprising, though. Anderson is usually ambiguous when it comes to dramatic character growth, life-changing epiphanies or closure, offering few pat resolutions.
On the other hand, the climax in The Darjeeling Limited, with the Whitmans forced to abandoned their luggage, was a bit too tidy. My wife even jokingly remarked, “I get it! The baggage is a metaphor for baggage.”
One wonders, with Anderson’s continued focus on estrangement, about the director’s own familial relationships. His films are, of course, fabricated. But the character of Jack is a writer whose short-stories, we learn, are ripped wholesale from his life, despite his repeated claims that, “the characters are all fictional.” And Owen Wilson’s attempted suicide, shortly before Darjeeling’s release, further blurs, albeit uncomfortably, the line between fiction and reality. Francis, we learn, has also tried to kill himself. Watching a weary and broken Francis, in his desire to form some sort of connection, one can’t help but question how closely Anderson and Wilson identify with the sad, empty characters they’ve repeatedly brought to life.
Bringing to a close my commentary on Anderson’s filmography, at least until the release of The Fantastic Mr. Fox later this year, I have one final observation on Jack’s writing.
As the film draws to a close, Jack reads aloud from his latest story, explaining, “I wrote the ending, but I don’t know how it starts.” The ending he reads is a verbatim description of the events depicted in Hotel Chevalier, Anderson’s short film that played in front of The Darjeeling Limited in theaters.
After Jack’s impromptu reading is finished, Francis suggests, “…it’s hard for me to judge the ending without knowing the rest of it.” Though Jack doesn’t realize it yet, he already has his story’s beginning, and we’ve just witnessed it.