Movie Log: The Darjeeling Limited

The Wife and I had hoped that Netflix would send us Death at a Funeral last week, but I guess it was slightly more popular than we rated, so we got our next choice, The Darjeeling Limited, instead. And we finally watched it Monday night.

It's about three brothers -- you can probably read the names of the actors who play them on the CD case to the left -- who are traveling through India for a reason only one of them knows. (And that's because he hasn't told the other two -- it's not quite clear what he did tell them, to get them to come along, but they all seem to be rich enough to run around the world at a moment's notice, and the organizing brother did recently have a near-fatal motorcycle accident.)

Things move on from there, but rarely in an linear way -- the movie, though, is totally honest about itself, since it starts off with five minutes of Bill Murray racing to catch a train and then shifts focus away from him for good. The Darjeeling Limited starts off by telling the audience "I'm going to show you some things, and not all of them will be relevant, and many of them may well be pointless tangents. But I'll get somewhere in the end. Are you with me?"

If you can say yes to that, The Darjeeling Limited is for you. If you prefer a movie that will make more regular stops according to its timetable -- if you've got somewhere else to be, unlike these three pampered rich dudes -- you should find another movie.

I don't have much more to say, other than to stand back and point in amazement at what's possibly the single most blatant bit of symbolism I've ever seen in a movie. You see, near the end, the three brothers have to throw away their father's baggage to catch their train together. I laughed out loud at the audacity of it. It's a moment when you can hear the director, Wes Anderson, mumbling "They'll get it if I have to beat their heads in with it!" We get it, Wes, we get it. But you might dial it back a bit next time.