Gun Crazy (1950)
Bart and Annie have one of the best meet cutes that I’ve encountered in the noir. Bart (John Dall) tall, handsome, but withheld and gawky, hits the carnival with a couple of friends to blow off a little steam after back to back stints in reform school and the army (I think I’d want to blow off more steam than a carnival could accommodate, but to each his own I suppose). The opening, awkwardly, establishes that Bart had a habit of letting his childhood obsession with firearms run away with him, but the Army, it would seem at least, has straightened him out and given him the kind of structure that the institution tends to claim is best for troubled adolescents.
That is until Bart gets a load of the appropriately named Annie Starr (Peggy Cummings), who shoots like Annie Oakley and very definitely resembles a star. After a few demonstrations, Annie’s announcer challenges the audience to a shoot-off with the Starr. Bart, transfixed, allows his friends to nudge him up unto the stage. Annie, clad in full rear-hugging cowgirl regalia which she compliments with a little Catholic school girl smile that barely disguises her naughty thoughts (the content of these thoughts representing the chief misunderstanding between men and women in the noir, men think it signals angry sex, women know it to actually be active fantasizing of ill gotten gains) is quite a sight as she blazes through her targets, but its Bart’s reaction to Annie that turns the scene on.
Many men of the noir are stupid, sexist pigs that get exactly what they deserve; Bart is more of an innocent. The trouble we’ve seen him get into so far has only been about a childish urge to possess that didn’t involve any harm, and he looks at Annie in the same way. He needs to have those feverish, pistol firing hands on him, but, and this is key, he actually likes her, is even in awe of her. Annie, of course, initially sees Bart, and thinks “schmuck”. The poignance of Annie and Bart’s first scene, and still yet another part of the turn-on, is that Bart would readily agree with Annie’s assessment of him…until he picks up the pistols for himself and beats Annie on her own turf. The carnal heat of this scene is considerable, but it also carries something more innocent, the fantasy of not only bedding the forbidden woman but being simpatico with her.
And so, inevitably, after a short courtship of sex and needling for money, Annie talks Bart into going along with a plan that she’s always had in the back of her mind, which, to me, bore a strong resemblance to your garden variety stick-up, though perhaps I’m blind to some intimate subtlety. Bart has one condition, and that’s that they absolutely do not kill anybody. Whether Annie violates this rule or not I’ll leave for you to discover but with a film called Gun Crazy I’m only giving you one guess.
Like The Narrow Margin, Gun Crazy is a scrappy, fast, surprisingly modern thriller. Director Joseph H. Lewis (working from a script co-written by an aliased Dalton Trumbo) makes the most of his clearly low budget, capturing the heists in immediate, hand held camera work that works in fleeting suggestion, feeding the audience just what they need and leaving the rest unsaid. The most effective bank robbery in the film, tellingly, doesn’t even show any of the bank robbery, just Annie’s mounting anxiety as she finds herself leaving the getaway car to distract a cop at the last tangible moment.
Gun Crazy even more notably withholds the judgment that was a prerequisite in crime films at the time. As in Bonnie and Clyde (and over fifteen years earlier to boot), the film has an uncomfortable empathy with its heroes, despite the innocent people who die (sorry), as Bart points out, “so we don’t have to work.” Cummings and Dall paint an interesting, more realistic than usual for the genre portrait of a relationship that swings back and forth like a pendulum, changing roles in a way that actual couples might recognize.
Bart initially plays the patsy as we expect, but the heists key into his meticulous, introverted nature, and bring something out in him. Annie thinks she’s the boss, but her hot head would be nowhere without Bart, and, by the middle of the film, she recognizes that. There’s a moment toward the end when Bart and Annie agree to separate, wait a few months, and then reunite with the cash. I resigned myself to Annie’s inevitable betrayal but the film surprised me, the lovers don’t even make it to the end of the road before reuniting. Bart’s mind, quicksilver trigger finger, and unyielding devotion have melted this intimidating blonde force of destruction. At the end, lying in an atmospheric, perfectly foggy swamp, Bart says that he’s happy; it’s a testament to the strange, convincing pulp power of Gun Crazy that I believed him.
★★★½
A Little Princess (1995)
Director Alfonso Cuarón excels in the types of pictures that tend to stump even the otherwise most considerable of directors. Cuarón’s films are sensual; they have a tingly heat, an otherness that immediately sets them apart from anyone else’s work. Cuarón gets sex, his Y tu mama tambien is one of the sexiest pictures ever made, and he gets the imagination, particularly of children. It makes sense really, why a filmmaker might understand how to portray both of these very disparate aspects of human nature so well. Sex and play are both very withheld and personal, and it takes a major talent: a humane, empathetic artist, to dramatize them to their fullest without succumbing to the cheap or maudlin.
I would have confidently written the above of Cuarón on the strength of Great Expectations, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Y tu mama tambien, and Children of Men, before taking the opportunity to see his English language debut, A Little Princess, a picture that was released early summer nearly thirteen years ago to critical acclaim and little else, a small film that was probably eaten up by louder, more obvious fare. Have you noticed how distressingly loud the children’s pictures have become? How determined they are to teach lessons of independence so long as its the sort of independence that entails buying a figure of whatever the most obnoxious character happens to be?
It’s unlikely, then, that many children bought dolls of Sara Crewe (Liesel Matthews), the name doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like a Transformer or a (damn, were these things of ever acceptable?) Power Ranger. Sara isn’t a super being but an intelligent girl of privilege, growing up in a storybook India with her father, Capt. Crewe (Liam Cunningham). As lush and ideal as the India of this film is, Sara still nurtures a considerable inner world, and the film opens as Sarah shares part of this world with her friends, the story of Prince Rama and his quest to save his wife Sita from the evil Ravana. The Prince’s story is dramatized for us, in a groovy series of peyote flavored episodes that begin to bear more and more similarity to the story of Sara herself.
We, of course, have to leave the mythical, painterly paradise of India. A Little Princess is a fairy tale after all, and the heroine, like most people who read fairy tales in the real world, is going to have to face a test of character. Capt. Crewe enlists in the First World War, and Sara is sent to a boarding school in New York that immediately arouses suspicion. It’s clear that the school isn’t going to understand Sara, and that the other children have forcibly bought in to the hysterical control that Miss Minchin (Eleanor Bron) wields. There’s hope at first, Sara’s money serves as a convenient bypass of the more extreme rules, but something awful soon happens that flips Sara’s world over, leaving her not only without her possessions but her schooling as well, forced to serve the girls who were her friends the day before.
We’ve certainly walked this walk before, A Little Princess is a simple story, the kind of story that depends more than any other on the craftsmanship of the filmmakers. Familiarity breeds contempt, but in the movies it can also breed a deep affection. We know Sara will find a way out of this fresh misery, right? We know she will be reunited with her father, and that retribution will land on the doorstep of the awful, unforgiving Miss Minchin, right? We know, but in the right hands, we never know, because most of us, like Sara, are looking for a good tale, an opportunity to suspend disbelief and revel in problems that rise and die before we’ve finished our popcorn.
There’s more to A Little Princess than just hitting the right storytelling marks though, Cuarón, even in his second film, exhibits a master’s touch with the material. The film is rapt and poetic, probably one of the more visually amazing films to be released in the 1990s. As in Cuarón’s other films, the visuals exist for more than their own beauty, they comment on the action, on the characters’ dreams or lack thereof. One scene, late in the film, ranks as one of Cuarón’s finest: Sara, lonely in her attic accommodations, looks out the window to the apartment next door to see the mysterious Indian man who just might be her savior looking back at her. He emits a light, and soon Sara finds herself in a spotlight of stars, an otherworldly appreciation that she has desperately needed since her father left.
Richard LaGravenese and Elizabeth Chandler’s script, lean and delicate, also plays fair with the character of Sara. She may be the star of a fairy tale, but she’s also a truthful portrait of a smart little girl who has that familiar to smart little girls’ habit of thinking she knows everything. Watch the opening moments with Sara in the boarding school, Miss Minchin is an undeniable pill, but Sara does her part too, stepping on toes, breaking rules, knowing that her father’s money will be the ultimate tie-breaker. Sara might not know this, but she certainly knows this. Minchin, likewise, is allowed a speck of sympathy. Sara asks Minchin if her parents ever told her that she was a princess, and the pained, twisted look tells us all.
A Little Princess is a wonderful film, perhaps the most purely consistent thing that Cuarón made thus far. The film doesn’t have the convolutions of the Harry Potter novel to contend with, nor the disappointing third acts of Children of Men or Y tu mama tambien. Princess is confidently about one thing and one thing only, and that can be found on the back of the DVD box: Every girl everywhere is a princess. What a wonderful thing to believe.
★★★½
Things We Lost in the Fire (2007)
Jerry (Benicio Del Toro) lives in what appears to be a one room dormitory with a sink and a lover that, for all we see, may have died the night before. Jerry shows up for his very committed best friend, Brian’s (David Duchovny) funeral wearing a suit that was clearly cut for him when he was a different size. Jerry tucks cigarettes behind his ear and when he smokes them he clutches them until they reach the butt, the smoke wafting beautifully between his fingers and tortured face. Jerry has a habit of calling friends out on their mistakes with a little “mwaw mwaw” sound that he most likely borrowed from a game show that ran during his youth. Jerry is also a heroin addict and, in relapse, he asks for a Snickers bars and ice cream to sooth his Hellish return to proper consciousness. If you had to be a heroin addict, you’d want to be Jerry. Hell, if you’re hung-over, you’d still want to be Jerry, to look half as mysteriously, glamorously ravaged as Jerry at his worst.
People have called Benicio Del Toro’s work in Things We Lost in the Fire brilliant, and the performance is, undoubtedly, quite an achievement. But is it the sort of achievement this particular picture desperately needs? Del Toro gives the viewer all sorts of bits and pieces to chew on, the little slipping on the woman’s white glove ticks that people respond to because they can be identified so confidently as “acting”. As memorable as Del Toro’s portrayal of Jerry is, it still represents a bit of treading water for the actor. Note the word “glamorous” above, how glamorous should an unstable heroin addict be? Things We Lost in the Fire, as its Book of the Month club title indicates, is a self-improvement Oscar fantasy. We wish the Jerry’s of the world were this likable, and we wish that we could help them, while compromising our own lives as little as possible.
Del Toro’s Jerry is fascinating and alive but he doesn’t feel like a fascinating and alive drug addict. This is the film that could use a shitting of the pants. Allan Loeb’s rigid and unwavering screenplay has no room for that sort of thing though, he’s too busy stating his theme (which is repeated three times at the end in case you went to the bathroom for, I don’t know, 110 minutes). Susanne Bier’s direction only further highlights the script’s obviousness, this thing needs to be played loose and dingly dangly, Bier instead cuts many of the major scenes into a series of close-ups, with characters staring into space for prolonged moments as the score does an instrumental number that all but broadcasts SERIOUS.
Normally I probably wouldn’t have even bothered to review Fire, you get what you pay for after all, but the film continues to show frustrating signs of promise only to dash them time and again. Jerry eventually accepts an offer from Audrey, Brian’s widow, (Halle Berry) to stay with her and her two children in a joint effort to stitch together a few threads of their lives. Jerry and Audrey have a palpable sexual tension, and for a moment my hopes rose; as a love story that blossoms in one the more inappropriate situations imaginable, this picture had a chance. I normally don’t buy Berry in her bids for award winning actress, but she fares surprisingly well here and with material that’s considerably weaker than Del Toro’s. On the page Audrey is a noble suffering wife, but Berry imbues the part with a ripe, ambiguous sexuality that she didn’t manage in her over-praised performance in Monster’s Ball. Audrey and Jerry look one another over, with varying degrees of hate, arousal and distrust, and for a few moments I forgot which picture I was watching.
Bier and Loeb soon reminded me, and so the film remains stuck, never to diverge too far from the message, never to acknowledge that the characters might, for a moment, be fallible, or (perish the thought!) unlikable. The Audrey/Jerry story remains safe and the children remain photogenic and largely untroubled. Even a less controversial but appealing friendship that Jerry develops with Audrey’s neighbor Howard (John Carroll Lynch), is cut distressingly short.
And what of everyone’s immediate taking to Jerry anyway? The dangers of choosing a drug addict you barely directly know as a surrogate friend, husband or father is never elaborated upon much either, nor is the guilt that could arise from immediately grasping on to someone else in the wake of another’s death. As in most films that deal with drug or mental abuse, Jerry’s problem is just a means to a dramatic short-cut, a healing that would probably, outside of fantasy, be safer to seek elsewhere. There’s no room for any inconvenient feeling or messiness in Things We Lost in the Fire, it wants us to simply “take the good with the bad.” This film could use quite a bit more of both.
★★½
Margot at the Wedding (2007)
Writer-director Noah Baumbach’s decision to cast Jennifer Jason Leigh and Nicole Kidman as sisters in Margot at the Wedding, his new absurdist farce of unyielding cruelty, was an inspired one. Kidman’s Margot is seemingly confident, accomplished and impressive; Leigh’s Pauline, beautiful as she is, appears withheld and destined to be seen as forever insubstantial by comparison; uncomfortable with her accomplishments, her surroundings and, of course, within her own skin. The sisters’ contrast is pointed and immediate: we fear Margot, we fear for Pauline. We want to take Pauline up in our hands and whisk her away to a place that better appreciates her airy fragility. We watch these sisters awkwardly embrace and recognize that they are meant to hurt one another, repeatedly, in strange, unending domestic skirmishes that eventually add up to full-blown, life poisoning warfare.
Nicole Kidman is a stunning presence, one of the few of the current actresses who exude that un-Earthly, Valhalla grace that used to define the stars of yesteryear. That grace, for Kidman anyway, usually seems to come at the price of a self-consciousness that’s stifling and dull. Even her awful comedies feel bloodless and inorganic, as if she spoke to Meryl Streep’s agent and got the ok before deigning to mix it up for the cheap seats. It’s a pity too, because some of Kidman’s work is legitimately exciting; at her best she has an undeniable, tethered heat; unsurprisingly it’s her villains or barely hinged characters that fully register: Dead Calm, To Die For, and even the appealingly ludicrous Malice. Plop Kidman down in an Oscar wannabe and she’s aloof and false; adrift in good intentions.
Baumbach breaks Kidman’s shell in Margot at the Wedding, her best work since The Others. Kidman doesn’t look like a beautiful woman straining to play a normal person here as she has in many of her past films; this picture is cannier than that. Kidman’s Margot instead looks like a beautiful woman who used to be an incredibly beautiful woman, and now has to settle for being just a beautiful woman possessed with an incomparable intelligence that she wields like a broad sword, smattering anyone who dare exhibit more than a passing affection for (or slight insight of) her.
That most anyone would kill to have the looks or talent of the current Margot is, of course, never considered. Margot is only focused on Margot or, more precisely, everything that has ever failed or disappointed Margot. How Margot registers to others somehow manages to be of both the smallest and largest importance, a contradiction that drives everyone, herself included, very nearly mad. Pauline sums it up, as everyone in this film has a habit of doing, perfectly, succinctly, savagely: “It’s tempting to fuck around with a guy nowadays because we aren’t as attractive as we used to be.”
This sort of dialogue (which, truthfully, I paraphrased) is probably the reason some people reject Noah Baumbach, as well as the reason a lot of people rejected Margot at the Wedding. There’s seemingly no subtext to Baumbach’s laser-beam cynicism: all of the characters say exactly what they think as soon as they think it and in the most artfully composed way that they could possibly say it. That’s missing the point. The lack of subtext in Baumbach’s work, especially this and his previous picture, The Squid and the Whale, is the subtext; Baumbach’s characters admit their and their friend’s failures in the supposed service of honesty and self-help, but the true function is self-justification. Most people blanket their insecurities and bitterness in an AM radio stream of bland pleasantries and half-compliments. Margot, Pauline, and even Pauline’s fiancé Malcolm (Jack Black, not bad), are too sharp for that, they let loose in an opposite, equally contrived blast of rapid-fire “honesty” that masks a pleading affection.
Margot at the Wedding is imperfect but remarkable; overpowering, daring, and nearly surreal in its cynicism. Baumbach could almost be said to be conjuring the sensibility of Luis Buñuel in his apparent disdain for the rigid banality of the traditional “everybody gets together for a wedding and heals” picture. Baumbach’s Margot is, to a certain extent, just as false as those sorts of pictures, but on the opposite end of the usual spectrum. This is the wedding get together of your worst Art movie fueled nightmares: everyone says the wrong thing, everyone turns out to be a cheat, and everyone goes home worse than they were before they left. It’s telling that the one character in Margot that could be said to be an unambiguously decent person enters the picture late, and exits early.
But, ultimately and most importantly, Margot isn’t a monster. She’s a bit like Daniel Plainview, a more famous so-called “monster” from 2007. As in the Anderson film, there are clues in Margot for anyone who wishes to go looking. Pay attention to the conversation Margot has with her son Claude (Zane Pais, wonderful) in the beginning of the film about his sunglasses and watch how that episode pays off toward the end of the film. Watch how Margot handles a seemingly innocent question at her book reading (a scene that actually has odd parallels with Plainview’s church scene). Watch how Margot reaches, and reaches, and reaches, and then recoils upon receiving what she asked for time and time again. Margot’s end is more truthful and ambitious than The Squid and the Whale’s more conventional non-ending; no one comes of age here, no one truly connects, but they still hope to, and that, for the moment, will have to count as a happy ending, at least until Noah Baumbach, in his ballsy, broken curiosity, can come to terms with whatever domestic demon it is that continues to haunt him.
★★★½
Alligator (1980)
Special Thanks to Christian for this recommendation, you all owe it to yourselves to check the QT series he’s currently running on his blog.
The movies bring us beautiful women on a weekly basis, but there’s a scary, plastic Stepford quality to many of them nowadays that can be a bit of a turn-off, particularly for your traditional pasty, movie-going nerd who makes little in the way of actual money. These women are beautiful in that pre-planned way, seemingly more likely to ask for a resume than a drink. You may dream of them carnally (our principles, after all, only go so far) but they probably don’t inhabit your fulfilling, fanciful, dreams of companionship and romance. You don’t want to solve a mystery with most of these new girls. You don’t want to build a clubhouse or play under the covers with most of these new girls. And you most certainly don’t want to chase a giant runaway mutant alligator with these new girls.
In 1980, the girls of the not quite taken seriously genres seemed rougher, sexier, more mysterious and more human. These girls would most assuredly pass the entrance gate of your most intimate dreams too, but would be equally at home wielding a two by four or a pistol or drinking you under the table at your favorite bar. They could, needless to say, also contend with that big alligator that seems to keep intruding on our vague discussion of sexy girls.
Sorry, you probably care about the alligator, but it’s a mark of the appeal of John Sayles’ and Lewis Teague’s Alligator that I care more about the beautiful, almost convincingly nerdy, alligator expert Marisa Kendell, played by Robin Riker. The girl in horror movies normally functions as anesthetic for the boring exposition that normally eats up half of the film, but I actually liked Kendall, and you know from the moment she enters the picture that she’s the little girl in the opening whose pet is now a Jaws imitation, eating people sleazy or dumb enough to enter a sewer drain that looks like the Castle of Dr. Frankenstein if it was renovated and re-opened a few months later as an S&M dungeon. That she wanted a pet alligator is charm enough, that said alligator inspired her line of work is positively bewitching.
Riker is actually the sidekick here, the hero proper is Robert Forster’s David Madison, a rough and tumble, gruff, balding, instinctual guy who might not be the brightest bulb on the force (he needs Riker’s gator expert to underline things that your average four year old could grasp) but he makes up for it in lack of pretense and pure, no bullshit goodness. Forster, as he did in Jackie Brown years later, is one of the most laid back, appealing cops the movies have given us. He’s mournful and self-loathing, but it’s not the self-loathing of the manipulative, self-congratulatory 1980s cop variety. This guy has average guy issues and Riker, a closet nerd, sees that and goes to bed with him, and we believe it. Their scenes, while brief, have an off the cuff charm that many Oscar pictures could use. Forster gets Riker in his apartment and confesses that he thought she was a real tight-ass. Riker says she took one look at him and figured he’d have an apartment just like the one she currently, unexpectedly, finds herself in.
Ladies who read Bowen’s Cinematic (I’ve counted at least two): this is what men want, at least this is what the men you should want want: a dialed down bust your balls sass that really translates as true affection. Do Riker and Forster fall in love? Of course not. They have something that will probably age better and bring them more retrospective pleasure: a brief, sugary acknowledgement: a respite from cuffing perps and bagging gators.
John Sayles, the horror movies want you back. The horror movies need your gift for off the wall flakery, for airy parody that turns toward violence with unsettling ease. The horror movies need your gift for characters that you actually give a damn about despite the flimsiest of shadings. The well-intentioned but increasingly boring social conscience pictures are fine without you. Drop that genre and any fifty directors will happily be there to pick up the slack in the morning.
But I don’t want to discount director Lewis Teague. He doesn’t imbue Alligator with the erotic charge that Joe Dante brought to Sayles’ The Howling, but, truthfully, he probably doesn’t need to. Alligator is a blunter affair, a romping, stomping creature feature knock-off/spoof that was already exhibiting Sayles’ patent distrust of politicians of all sizes. Sayles’ bad guys here, including an amusingly sleazy Dean Jagger, are only slightly less subtle than his Dickie Pilager of Silver City. The rage that clearly drives Jagger’s death scene almost overwhelms the picture; the alligator, for a moment, isn’t an alligator, but a vengeful demon, crushing Jagger in his own cocoon of self-absorbed privilege. Teague keeps the picture and the gator moving, cutting the moments of violence into necessarily (for the budget) brief nuggets of chaos that prove that Teague and Sayles were hip to more in Jaws than just the giant critter. And bonus points to these gentlemen for the perverse explanation for the alligator’s enormity.
Mr. Tarantino needs to get Riker’s number.
★★★
The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
I’m a frustrating (to those with stronger beliefs anyway) middle-grounder in the Wes Anderson is brilliant/overrated/or just over debate. Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, both now over a decade old, should be filed away in the canon under Comedies, Great. Both are lean, strong, frequently hilarious tales of that terrified pupa stage that the American male seems to enter somewhere in early (to middle to late) twenties before accepting that he IS a man, and that disappointment isn’t a valid excuse to forego all the other things, such as friendship, sex and eating, that life entails. Bottle Rocket and, especially, Rushmore are about the collapse of a frequently male dollhouse, and the period of mourning that has a habit of setting in after that collapse.
The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic are impeccably crafted pictures that anyone would be proud to have been a part of, but they are more problematic, and redundant of Anderson’s first two films. The art for art’s sake hyper-staged decor fits Rushmore, that was Max’s refuge, but it seems to be present in Tenenbaums and Life Aquatic so they can be said to look neat. While The Life Aquatic remains a step in the right direction from the self-conscious, please love me desperation of The Royal Tenenbaums, its refusal to break free from Anderson’s frequently more anal-retentive form is actually more irritating than Tenenbaums, if only because the subject matter more readily begs for a bracing break from form: Bill Murray as a wayward sea adventurer! Hell…oh.
And so now we have The Darjeeling Limited, which sounded, on paper and in the trailers, like Anderson wandering further down a forest he shouldn’t have been heading for in the first place. In theory Darjeeling has everything the Anderson satirist needs to paint a damning portrait of acclaimed auteur head-up-his-own-assedness. Young, privileged, vaguely artsy protagonists with daddy issues? Check. Groovy art-directed vehicle or home that serves as principle setting for grappling with said issues? Check. Overwhelming, masturbatory attention devoted to heroes’ shoes, journals, and various other apparatus just as whatever it is they may do for a living goes virtually unmentioned? Check. Precious, faux-literary title? Check! Check!
Wrong. Wrong. The Darjeeling Limited is easily Wes Anderson’s best picture since Rushmore. The artifice that divides people so has been mercifully stripped down, but also has, more importantly, been re-contextualized: Anderson’s famed mise-en-scene again (poignantly) reflects the characters’ inability to abandon the moony, college freshman romanticism to which all real life pales by comparison. Anderson immediately sets the stakes with the short that (and always should have) immediately precedes the film, Hotel Chevalier, which follows twelve minutes in the life of Jack (Jason Schwartzman) as he waits for his on again, off again, on again love (Natalie Portman) to reappear in the plush hotel room that he has evidently been hiding out in for awhile. He cleans himself up, he turns on some music, he draws her bubble bath, and when she arrives they engage in one of the strongest, most beautiful scenes Anderson has ever staged.
Anderson’s frequently used pan, the one that very consciously clues you in to the movement of the camera as it glides from the left to right side of the room, is employed here, but it has never felt as vibrant, as necessary. That pan is time itself, and the characters, after all is done, have nothing left but to look out at the Paris that awaits them on the other side of the room. Hotel Chevalier has something that I haven’t seen in Anderson since Rushmore: authentic desperation. Desperation laced with an intoxicating love for the movies: imagine the lovers of Breathless infected with the wounded lonely boy sensibility of Harold and Maude and you have a general idea.
The Darjeeling Limited retains the shorter film’s air of longing, opening on a frantic, misleading chase to the titular train. A businessman (Bill Murray) just misses out, while Jack’s brother, Peter (Adrien Brody) slimmer, younger, less encumbered by life’s shit, manages to hop aboard at the last possible minute, accompanied, as one might expect, by coming of age slow-motion and a tune that I will probably buy after seeing the film. This opening moment is spry and engaging but it, like Hotel Chevalier, comes with an intangible aftertaste of loneliness. Perhaps Murray’s businessman wasn’t just trying to catch The Darjeeling Limited, but The Darjeeling Limited as well, only to be left behind, out of sight, out of mind, while we follow similar adventures that are only of concern to Jack, Peter, and their oldest brother, Francis (Owen Wilson). There’s no room for a never-ending cast of characters in The Darjeeling Limited; the film is, like the best moments of The Life Aquatic, spare, eccentric and unapologetically introverted.
The film is also, lest we forget, funny. Anderson has, with co-writers Schwartzman and Roman Coppola, re-found that flakey, non-sequiturious humor that powers his best moments. The dialogue here is sharp and pared down; rife with bitter double, triple and quadruple meanings. Anderson doesn’t ladle on the exposition here as he did in Tenenbaums, he trusts us to find our way. Anderson extends this trust to his three actors too, who look nothing like brothers (that would appear to be part of the joke) but nonetheless paint a convincing, mysterious portrait of three people who love and hate each other in ratios they haven’t quite figured out yet themselves.
Brody and Schwartzman are frequently impressive, even if the material falters, but Wilson’s return to form here is a happy surprise. Wilson’s Francis is, intentionally or not, undeniably reminiscent of his Dignan from Bottle Rocket. Francis has Dignan’s stubborn self-delusion in the face of defeat as well as his need to hold all the cards in a situation that may not even have cards to begin with. Wilson’s age is beginning to catch up with him, and it may free him from his too carefully cultivated surfer-Zen hipster thing. We see Francis in a series of bandages (resembling a biker mummy) from the neck up for the majority of the film, but a flashback (which is, itself, a marvel of timing and design) shows him fully de-bandaged and reveals Francis, jarringly, to look no less damaged. Francis is a plastic man of denial, and Wilson taps into that beautifully, intuitively.
What a wonderful picture The Darjeeling Limited is, it’s one of those movies that tempts one to abandon all pretense of a proper review and simply point out the scenes they like and why they like them. I found the revelation of the truth of Francis’s accident to be particularly brilliant: a key moment treated as a wounded throwaway. Or the picture’s climax: a potentially been there, done that “I finally found Mommy and the secret of life” scene re-staged as a bitter, elusive disappointment. The Darjeeling Limited is a marvel of implication, of fleeting, floating, easily missed answers and contradictions. The film is a superb physical comedy, a tour through all the Anderson ticks that ends at a place of grace and understanding. The pat answers of The Royal Tenenbaums have been washed away and replaced by a simpler, more truthful, consolation: life is always a partial, dependable disappointment, so just get on the damn train and go.
★★★½
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