Script Review: The Darjeeling Limited

by Anna Pulley

Without Wes Anderson’s visual, stylistic trademarks, I thought it would be considerably difficult to review his new screenplay, The Darjeeling Limited (also written by Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, slated to come out in December of 2007). But it was precisely because of those signature trademarks and the consistency with which Anderson executes his annoyingly affable hipsterishness that made the story a highly enjoyable read and a surprisingly easy move from a written to a visual adaptation.

The Darjeeling Limited is about bourgeois brothers trying to mend their broken relationships with one another and seeking drive-thru enlightenment in the meantime. It’s an anguished comedy built around seriousness, with the oft-scheduled detour of nonsequitor asides and the usual comic agitations of familial disappointment. The story revolves around the Wilson brothers, Francis (probably Owen Wilson), Peter (probably Jason Schwartzman), and Jack (probably Adrien Brody), who are traveling throughout India via train, on a spiritual quest to be reunited with their estranged mother, whom they haven’t seen since the death of their father. With exquisitely illogical flair, The Darjeeling Limited teeters often between parody and melodrama, with a peppering of slapstick thrown in to taste. While The Life Aquatic has a Brazilian deckhand who sings “Ziggy Stardust” in Portuguese, Darjeeling has Brendan, Francis’ bald assistant with alopecia who prints and laminates their itinerary from an undisclosed location on another part of the train. Other blatant Andersonian elements in Darjeeling include the use of narrative framing, the neglectful, unresponsive parent figure (Anjelica Huston), and the meandering absurdity of circular dialogue and pointless minor characters. As Rushmore was presented like a play and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou like a documentary, Darjeeling also uses a framing device, this time in the form of a short story that Jack writes and which actually occurs later in the film as a flashback.

While there is some plot to be found, the essence of the story hinges on slapsticky moments of revelation, like the brothers buying a poisonous snake, which escapes almost immediately from its shoebox and runs amok on the train, a shoeshine boy stealing one of Francis’ $3000 snakeskin loafers and him being forced to wear one white rabbit fur slipper, Jack spraying Peter and Francis in the face with mace (twice) when they won’t stop fighting, and a skirmish with an Australian cricket team. Each of these instances smacks of the eccentric yet endlessly engaging ridiculousness that Anderson champions, but a persistent gloom also pervades the story. Indeed, there is grim yet playful tug o’ war with emotional abandonment and death that follows the flippant brothers on their spiritual journey. Once they inevitably get kicked off the train for being such a nuisance, they stumble upon three little boys on a raft that capsizes. They manage to save two of the boys but one doesn’t make it. The villagers reward the brothers’ heroic deed by taking them in and inviting them to the funeral. The funeral of the boy leads into a flashback of their father’s funeral, causing them to reexamine their relationships to each other and to their absent father.

Just when you think the plot has become too serious, however, we are inevitably introduced to an animated jaguar shark or equivalent that roots us firmly back into the comedic realm. After their mother sends a letter requesting that they not come to visit her due to “the recent arrival of a man-eating tiger. Also, frankly, there is not much to eat” there comes a moment of quiet introspection, when Jack says: I wonder if the three of us would’ve been friends in real life. Not as brothers, but as people.

Francis: Of course, we would.

Jack: Wouldn’t it sound great if you could hear a train going by off in the distance right now?

Peter: Not really.

Francis: It’d probably be annoying.

This scene has a potential to be unabashedly sentimental, for the brothers to forgive and embrace each other’s individualism, no matter how much they seem to clash, but instead it lapses into a mocking of the romantic elements that typically make up such scenes, in this case, a train rumbling by in the distance. But with Anderson, we come to expect such things. We expect exaggeration and mockery and skewed emotional complacence. And we believe him when he tells us life is a profoundly disappointing affair because otherwise, it wouldn’t be nearly as funny, right?