The Darjeeling Limited

This was really enjoyable. I know I over-rate Anderson films but it's because I highly enjoy both his visual sensibility and the quirky style of humanistic humour that's pervasive in his work. I also greatly admire Adrien Brody's acting--so taken together, even though this isn't considered one of his better efforts, it was 4.5/5 or 9/10 for me.

On the face of it, this doesn't sound like the ingredients for much of a comedy. A father dies in an accident and each of his three, depression-ridden, sons decide it's a good idea to embark on a train across India to reunite with their mother in the foothills of the Himalayas. To put it mildly, none of them really has much time for the other. "Jack" (Jason Schwartzman) is the baby of the group, then there's "Peter" (Adrien Brody) who has left his expectant wife at home in America and then there's the eldest, the bandaged-up "Francis" (Owen Wilson), whose somewhat eccentric idea this rather curious journey actually was and whose long-suffering factotum "Brendan" (Wallace Wolodarsky) did the organising. The Darjeeling from the title isn't actually the tea, but the name of the train they must take from Jodhpur and it's on and around this vehicle that their adventures tend to occur. Of course, we aren't talking about them sitting down in a sik class cabin sipping tea and watching the scenery. No. Instead, "Jack" takes a shine to the hostess "Rita" (Amara Karan) which leads to the formation of a railway equivalent of the mile-high-club, before they manage to buy an extremely poisonous snake that manages to escape their custody in their packed carriage! The chaos that ensues is just the start of the antics that sees them confined to their cabin and then, even worse, chucked of the train altogether - a bridge too far for the assistant who decides that discretion is the better part of valour and abandons this hapless and incident-prone trio. What chance now they will make it to surprise "Mother Patricia"? This is one of my favourite Wes Anderson films as it has more structure to it's - admittedly somewhat insubstantial - story and it's characterisations, and immersed in the richness and contrasts of the culture of this vast and vibrant nation, he makes the most of both their exterior surroundings and the fixed-space conduit that their train offers as their disdain for each other rarely abates. I never was nor will be much of a fan of Owen Wilson - I just didn't appreciate his style of comedy acting either for Anderson or Woody Allen, but here he does work well enough with the frequently semi-clad Brody and, for me at any rate, the scene stealing Schwartzman who seems to have had all the best threads and lines from the plot and the plentiful script. Laugh out loud? Well no - but then again I find so few American comedies actually are. This is more an amiable romp that could just have been called "Related Strangers on a Train", and I quite enjoyed it's brevity too.