The Darjeeling Limited

What better topic for post number two than to comment on Wes Anderson's latest film, The Darjeeling Limited. After an ultra-stylized offering with The Life Aquatic that was little enjoyed by any but die-hard Anderson fans, he has responded with an incredibly enjoyable film. And as you would expect with Anderson, it has all the same elements of joy mixed with melancholy, family struggles, alienation, and searching for love.

Schwartzmen is the best that I've seen him since Rushmore, which is not setting the bar terribly high, of course. (Hopefully he will get that monkey off his back and start kicking out some of the great performances that everyone was hoping for from such a talented young actor.) I thought he played his role almost pitch perfect - a self-centered, prep-school dilettante, he is involved in an unhealthy relationship with Natalie Portman in the short, Hotel Chevalier - both characters manipulating each other, but Portman clearly has hand in the relationship. After meeting up with his older brothers in India, he remains the self-centered manipulator. But he accurately fills the youngest brother role and his character wanes behind the clashing personalities of Wilson and Brody.

Brody gives the best performance of the movie, in my opinion. The middle brother everyman who is suffocating in his life at home and wants to run away from wife and expected child, but is paralyzed by fear. It is great to see his personality slowly get forced back to life by the dynamic of reuniting with his brothers and their journey together.

Owen Wilson plays Owen Wilson again, which is exactly what I want. As others have already commented, there is plenty of life-meets-art irony as Wilson's character, Francis, is trying to put his life back together after a thwarted suicide attempt. The movie opened a month or two after Wilson's own suicide attempt.

Anjelica Huston delivers an incredible performance in five minutes of screen time. She reminded me exactly of a hard-driving matriarch from a wealthy Texas family that I know. While Texas probably had nothing to do with the character in the move, that is where Wes Anderson comes from, and he seems to have written my friend's mother into the role.

Bill Murray is incredible in a 30 second cameo. How happy am I that Murray and Anderson met.

The movie remains a standard Anderson flick, of course. If you enjoy his quirky, character based movies with great soundtracks and the standard set-scenes - long close-ups of lead characters staring into the screen, slow-motion action sequences set to '60s British rock, and loaded with endearing and maddening dialogue, then you will enjoy Darjeeling.