For those of you who go see Wes Anderson's "The Darjeeling Limited," the good news is you'll get to see his brilliant short film, "Hotel Chevalier," projected before the main feature. After some controversy, Fox Searchlight has agreed to attach it to all prints of the film, and it's maybe the best thing Anderson's ever made.
This spare, evocative piece about the final coupling between Jack Whitman (Jason Schwartzman) and his ex-girlfriend (Natalie Portman) works in ways you don't expect; it's dry and passionate, funny and somber. Plus, Portman looks like Jean Seberg from "Breathless," and she has one of the best lines I've heard in a movie all year. It's not fit for print here, but you'll know it when you hear it.
I loved all 11 minutes of "Hotel Chevalier" — it shows Anderson at the top of his game and suggests a new maturity and depth of feeling that we haven't really seen from him.
The bad news is that you can see "Hotel Chevalier" for free online without having to suffer through the feature length film that follows.
"The Darjeeling Limited" is, for me, the biggest disappointment of the year. I love Wes Anderson something fierce. "Bottle Rocket" is one of the great debut flicks of all time, and both "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums" are, in my opinion, two perfect films.
His last film, 2004's "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," didn't live up to the heights of the previous three, but the stripped-down and whimsical "Darjeeling" seemed, on paper, to be a step in the right direction — the feuding Whitman siblings, Francis, Peter, and Jack (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Schwartzman again) take a picaresque trip to India to reconnect with each other and find spiritual grace after the death of their father, even if attempting to do so pulls them further apart. Good stuff, right?
Wrong. This is Anderson's worst flick, a visually stunning yet emotionally muddled yarn that isn't half as profound or funny as it thinks it is. I'm even having a hard time believing this is Anderson's work; it feels like a subpar imitation by an ardent and untalented admirer.
Other than the beautiful Indian locales and some choice musical cuts (but nothing as good as Anderson's use of "Ooh-La-La" in "Rushmore" or "These Days" in "The Royal Tenenbaums"), there's nothing noteworthy about this flick, save for the fact that:
1. It made me appreciate "The Life Aquatic" so much more. That flick may not have the emotional resonance of Anderson's other work, but it's creative and aggressively quirky and odd enough to at least be consistently interesting (and it loves David Bowie obsessively, just like I do. So, there's that too).
2. It gave me a film experience I've never had before. About a third of the way through, during the brothers' excursion into a bazaar in India, when the movie was just "boring" and not "bad," I began to sense that that it would grow more horrible as it went on, and I wanted out of the theater. Not because I was offended at what I'd seen, but because I was worried I would be offended at what was to come. I have such respect for Anderson that I wanted to leave the theater with what few good memories I had of the flick to that point. I stayed. I shouldn't have.
If I wasn't clear enough, Anderson's really off his game here. The whole movie is unfocused and dull — it's only 91 minutes, but feels three times as long because nothing of interest happens to characters we don't care about. You'd think a flick with rampant drug abuse, poisonous snakes, amorous bathroom interludes, religious epiphanies, and a man-eating Bengal tiger would be exciting, and you'd be right, normally, but Anderson works his hardest to make it not so in this flick. I suppose that's not solely his fault; the three lead performances are so unlikable and irritating that you begin to actively seek ill will to befall them.
I like Wilson, Brody, and Schwartzman a lot, but they play such unredeemable jerks here that you almost can't care about them. You can make a movie about a jackass and have it work. Anderson did it with Gene Hackman as Royal in "The Royal Tenenbaums." That's Hackman's best performance: a selfish, bitter, terrible father and husband who's also wonderfully funny and charismatic. He's magnetic in the part, and so we're with him even as he nonchalantly destroys the lives of those around him.
Maybe it's the writing, maybe the acting, probably it's both, but the Whitman siblings don't have that essential charm to undercut their meanness. They're just petty and cruel and when they do have a change of heart, it comes out from nowhere, and nothing we've seen up to that point suggests they're capable of having one.
Acting-wise, Brody's bland and uninspired, Schwartzman's just terrible, mannered and posturing his way through the role, and though Wilson fares best, I can't help but feel it's because his character's troubles uncomfortably mirror his real-life problems.
But wait! There's more! The dry, arch humor that Anderson's known for is present, except the material's a) not funny here and b) it's far too arch and dry, like it's being delivered in a vacuum where no humor can thrive.
I've never seen so many laugh lines go so flat. If you've seen the trailer, you've seen the only places where the humor does work. Still, that's small potatoes compared to Anderson's insistence on instilling profundity in the flick, which is flat-out offensive. He needs his flick to matter, and so he throws in a completely random and unearned tragedy at the halfway point to give his flick significance. It's insulting in its contrivance, it ends up wasting the talents of the great Indian actor Irfan Kahn (so good in "The Namesake" and "A Mighty Heart"), and what's worse, it leeches out the humor from this already-unfunny flick.
I wonder if the irony of making a meaningless flick about three characters searching for meaning was lost on Anderson. Hmm … something to ponder. Throw in an ending that feels longer than the 37 ones in "Return of the King," and the reducing of Anderson vets Bill Murray and Angelica Huston to symbolic cameos, and I was ready to Ambien myself out of the screening, had I the resources.
Furthermore, if ever you needed concrete proof that breaking with Owen Wilson as a writing partner has hurt Anderson's films, look no further. Not only is the script here the weakest Anderson's written (co-penned by Schwartzman and Roman Coppola), but after "The Royal Tenenbaums (the last flick he wrote with Wilson)," Anderson's work has evidenced a growing and unpleasant elitism.
His first three films favored the underdog — Dignan in "Bottle Rocket," Max in "Rushmore," and Royal in "The Royal Tenenbaums" – all self-made men (of varying successes) striving for high-class acceptance before realizing that it's best (and more emotionally fulfilling) to accept to accept the worlds they've come from, even at the expense of wealth, love, and privilege.
Now, the Whitman brothers are the upper-crust elite, and they want the underdog (as represented by India) to accept them. I call B.S., and I suspect it's the result of Anderson's personal identification with the "high-life" untempered by Wilson's more populist approach.
This review hurt to write. I wanted … no, I needed … to love this flick, and in the end, I couldn't even like it. It's unfunny, meandering and shallow; I can imagine it becoming the nadir of Anderson's body of work.
I still think Anderson's a brilliant filmmaker, but he needs to reinvent himself at once because, well, because I'd hate to picture a world where I began dreading his upcoming flicks. It just hurts to hate a filmmaker you once loved. I cannot abide another Woody Allen.
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