BY HAPPENSTANCE, I bought a paperback copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point the day before picking up the DVD of Wes Anderson’s latest film, The Darjeeling Limited. The idea behind Gladwell’s book is that cultural phenomena–books that turn into bestsellers, fashions that sweep across the country, precipitous drops in crime–can be attributed to a series of oftentimes very insignificant changes in the background of society (e.g., removing graffiti from the New York City subway system), or the efforts of taste-making individuals with a broad base of friends to promote something (i.e., great word of mouth on a new restaurant).
On his website, Gladwell compares “tipping points” to “memes,” a meme being an “idea that behaves like a virus–that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects.” I mention this because I can’t think of another director in recent times that so embodies the notion of the tipping point as Wes Anderson.
Anderson’s first foray into the world of feature films was Bottle Rocket, a movie missed by most on its initial release in 1996 but which would end up growing on audiences and critics alike as the years went by. (Martin Scorsese would eventually label it his seventh favorite movie of the 1990s.) Though rejected by audiences initially, tastemakers labeled Anderson a young director to look for, and his second film, Rushmore, received great reviews and a wider release. Hype grew and Anderson-mania peaked with his third film, The Royal Tenenbaums, a dark vision of family life that deftly combined comedy and drama into an immensely entertaining little package. The Royal Tenenbaums was by far Anderson’s most successful film, grossing more than $50 million at the box office and garnering him and co-writer Owen Wilson an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay.
And then something went awry. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a meandering take on Jacques Costeau wrapped in familial melodrama, received mixed reviews that were, on the whole, much too fair to the film. It’s a mess, and audiences were wise to that fact. The box office take plummeted, and word of mouth began circulating: Anderson is done. He only has one type of film in him, that about family strife. All his movies look the same. Cutesy one liners are not the same thing as comedy. On and on the criticisms went, and suddenly the meme had flipped: Wes Anderson is no good–he needs to try something different.
This new tipping point is the reason audiences stayed away from the theater when The Darjeeling Limited came out. It’s a shame, because The Darjeeling Limited is a powerful return to form for Anderson. Well, that’s not quite right. It would be more accurate to describe this movie as a powerful photocopy of The Royal Tenenbaums; the two films are virtually identical. Both the Tenenbaum clan and the Whitman clan contain three virtually identical siblings: a domineering control freak who is unsure of his father’s love (Ben Stiller in Tenenbaums, Owen Wilson in Darjeeling); an artist with a morose outlook on life (Gwyneth Paltrow in Tenenbaums, Jason Schwartzman in Darjeeling); and a lanky space case who’s not quite sure what he wants from life (Luke Wilson in Tenenbaums, Adrien Brody in Darjeeling). Both deal with families coming to terms with the death of a loved one. And both alternate between dark humor and sincere sentimentality.
The trio in The Darjeeling Limited venture to India on a spiritual quest a year after the death of their father. The first half of the film is set on a passenger train transporting them to their long-lost mother, the second in the Indian countryside. In the first half, Anderson seems content to make fun of the brothers as typical Westerners, looking for the superficial paths to enlightenment promised by gurus and yogi and shrines. But once the band of brothers hits the Indian countryside the realities of life and death start to sink in, and they begin an earnest reevaluation of themselves and their family.
Like Anderson’s other movies, The Darjeeling Limited can be too cute by half at times. But the cleverness never gets in the way of the (admittedly thin) plot, and it never becomes distracting. The film looks exactly as you would expect a Wes Anderson film to look: the same Futura font, the same slow motion tracking shots, the same camera zooms. There is a great unity of vision at work in Anderson’s oeuvre–there hasn’t been a director with this distinctive a look since Stanley Kubrick.
The problem, and the reason public perception has tipped against Anderson, is that the film feels like a rehash of his previous works. It fits too nicely into said oeuvre. Considered on its own, the film would rightly be thought of as a revelation. Considered within Anderson’s body of work, however, The Darjeeling Limited makes it clear that his progression as an artist is as static as the group shots that litter his films. Anderson might not be done, but he does need to move on.
Sonny Bunch is assistant editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
