From the Archives: The Darjeeling Limited

From the pre-Talking Movies archives.

Three estranged brothers travel thru India on a spiritual journey, a year after their father’s death. But it quickly becomes less conciliatory than hoped for.

This is a Wes Anderson movie for people who hate Wes Anderson movies. The trademark whip-pans are present and correct but here the story doesn’t feel constrained by them. The tracking shots between rooms through walls that blighted The Life Aquatic by sheer overuse are quite charming here. Hell, even Bill Murray, who runs for and misses the titular train in the hilarious opening sequence, uses more facial expressions in his cameo than in the entirety of The Life Aquatic. It is a truly wonderful moment when we go into slow-motion as Murray hopelessly sprints for the train and a very distinctive nose emerges beside him as Adrien Brody overtakes him, catching the train at the last possible second. Watching the impossibly gangly Brody run in slow-motion is almost reason enough to see this film.

Brody steals the acting honours, as you might expect. As Peter, a man unsure if he’s really ready to have a child (because of his own troubled upbringing), haunted by the death of his father a year previous, and extremely wary of his older brother, he is nuanced and engaging. Surprisingly Owen Wilson (swathed in bandages throughout) is close behind him as the domineering older brother Francis, whose attempts at reconciliation on this spiritual pilgrimage are thwarted by his own controlling personality which has made detailed itineraries for them all. Jason Schwartzman is in the film. Why? He and his cousin co-wrote it. As the youngest brother, the failed author Jack, he is the weak link of the film but not even his blankness can detract from The Darjeeling Limited’s truly magical quirkiness.

The spiritual journey thru India inevitably goes wrong and, amidst much sibling bickering, the trio are thrown off the train. Anderson at this point casts in the stuff of real drama to the mix, with a revealing extended flashback to the funeral of the brothers’ father a year earlier, and the result is surprisingly affecting. Anjelica Huston’s subsequent cameo as their mother is quite magnificently fitting and leads to an enigmatic tracking shot of imaginary connections between characters in the film that is wonderfully sweet and sums up the charm of the whole enterprise as the brothers do finally arrive at a sort of spiritual epiphany and reconciliation with each other as a result of all their mishaps. It’s a pity Anderson prefaces this film with his execrable short Hotel Chevalier, which will be screened before this in all cinemas. You do not need to see it to enjoy The Darjeeling Limited. It is a cheap exploitation flick whose sole purpose is to showcase Natalie Portman’s first and last nude scene as she was horrified to find that for months the only part of the short film that was leaked onto the internet was her nude scenes. The Darjeeling Limited itself is endearing and substantial, get a ticket.

3/5

One Day (like this a year will see me right)

Regular readers will know that I appeared on Dublin South FM’s The First Saturday Book Club a couple of weeks ago, discussing David Nicholls’ 2009 novel One Day with Sorcha Nic Mhathuna, Eoghan Rice, and host Eve Rowan. Click here to listen to a podcast of that show.

Book Summary
Working-class Emma Morley and rich-kid Dexter Mayhew meet for the first time on the night of their graduation in 1988. They bungle becoming a couple, but an intense bond develops through Emma’s long letters to Dexter as he travels the globe. Dexter becomes a famous TV presenter given to patronising Emma, who is reduced to waitressing, but when she becomes a teacher her relationship with the increasingly arrogant Dexter falters. Dexter’s career implodes due to his alcoholism, while Emma becomes a successful children’s author, but Dexter’s shot-gun marriage foils their coming together. Will Dexter and Emma ever both be in the right place at the right time? And do they deserve a happy ending?

Structures & Pitfalls
BBC scriptwriter David Nicholls previously wrote Starter for Ten, and this starts off as another class conscious romantic comedy before it develops into something a good deal more ambitious; almost a history of social change in Britain between 1988 and 2007. The gimmick blazoned on the book cover, ‘Twenty Years. Two People. One Day’; referring to Nicholls’ audacious decision to only cover in detail the lives of this odd couple for the 15th of July each year; serves two purposes. The first of these is to allow him to gallop over a vast span of time and draw out the pop culture of each year. The second is to allow him to surprise the reader with sudden shifts between chapters. The latter is a trick well-worn by Patrick O’Brian in the Master & Commander novels, where cliff-hangers chapter endings routinely lead into chapters set months later that make no reference to how the cliff-hanger was resolved till half-way thru. Here it allows Nicholls to present conversations where you’re unsure if Dexter is addressing Emma or yet another bimbo girlfriend, and where characters change jobs and locations radically in a page.

The first purpose becomes an increasing problem as the novel progresses as there are too many attempts to cram every possible event in recent British history into the narrative. Dexter presents a show that is basically The Word, and then Channel 4’s failed rival to Later with Jools Holland, before ending up in the impeccably trendy organic food business. Emma bounces around from waitressing to teaching to becoming sort of JK Rowling. Emma’s disastrous meeting with a publisher is the nadir of this technique as it sees her standing on the South Bank afterwards recalling how jubilant she was the last time she was there, celebrating Blair’s 1997 landslide; of course Emma was there celebrating Blair’s victory you groan, Nicholls just had to tick that box… The gimmick works well for the first sections of the novel, as this is a day that the characters would consciously mark, and it becomes that again in the closing section, but during the middle sections of the book (as Dexter becomes ever more obnoxious) it feels very contrived.

Em & Dex: Rom-Com or Hardy-Com?
The character of Dexter is a problem. Emma is loveable and believable from start to finish as she manages to slowly sort her life out, but the privileged Dexter who is initially charming becomes increasingly irritating as he diligently works his way thru every cliché of Britpop excess. By contrast Nicholls’ protean minor characters are brilliantly drawn, from Dexter’s co-presenter Suki Meadows, whose bubbly personality is imagined as liable to start a letter of condolence with the word ‘Wahey!’, to his elegant bohemian mother Alison, who likes Emma precisely for the moment which embarrassed both Emma and Dexter; when Emma called Dexter’s father a bourgeois fascist for his views on Nicaragua, Alison saw a girl with some spine who would stand up to Dexter as he would desperately need his partner to. Alison sees the chemistry between Emma and Dexter that sustains the novel, until its circular ending which reveals more of their magical first day together, despite the truth of Emma’s unfunny stand-up boyfriend Ian’s observation that Dexter takes Emma for granted.

The ending suggests that Nicholls is so in thrall to his beloved Thomas Hardy that he chooses this particular ending merely to cast a backward profundity over what has gone before. The tragedy is that Nicholls does not need do this. Sure, there are moments that are reminiscent of other works. Dexter’s meeting with his agent is straight out of Extras, Emma’s feeble attempts at writing strongly suggest Spaced, and a disastrous sequence involving Dexter is practically lifted from Meet the Parents. But Nicholls has an undeniable skill at summarising cultural shifts in gags; in the 1980s of The Clash and Billy Bragg all the boys wanted to be Che Guevara, thinks Emma, in the Loaded and FHM zeitgeist of Britpop all the boys now want to be Hugh Hefner; and his greatest ability is not this sort of cultural commentary, but what seems to embarrass him.

Dexter’s long letter asking Emma to join him in India features the most memorable romantic comedy gesture I’ve read recently. Dexter tells her to stand in the centre of the Taj Mahal at noon wearing a red rose and holding a copy of Nicholas Nickleby, and he will find her; he will be wearing a white rose and holding the copy she gave him of Howards End. But Dexter forgets to post this letter; which will have you screaming, ‘No! Dexter!!’, at your book. An author capable of conjuring that level of emotional involvement with his characters and such deliriously heightened moments shouldn’t apologise for being a cracking rom-com writer, not Hardy…

Read the book, don’t wait for the movie. Any production which casts Anne Hathaway as Emma rather than Spaced‘s Jessica Stevenson obviously hasn’t a clue.