The Plot: Three brothers, estranged for a year since their father's funeral, meet in India to go on a spiritual journey.  The itinerary breaks down when they find themselves kicked off of their train, but the journey has only just begun.

"How about a second Oscar nomination, God?"

The Flax Take:
In The Darjeeling Limited, Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman play brothers, the three sons of a father who died a year previous after being hit by a car. The brothers haven’t spoken since, until they are abruptly reunited for a train trip through India that eldest brother Francis (Wilson) promises will be a spiritual journey. It is, although perhaps not in the way he intends.

Anderson has, for most of his career, been a master craftsman with emotions. Even as his directorial eccentricities are dismissed as pretentious or simply too precious, Anderson the writer/director has shaped characters propelled by strong human emotions, from love and loss, to guilt, grief and anger. He does all this while understanding the existence and value of humor in such situations, giving the best of his work a healthy mix of emotions from both ends of the spectrum, making it feel achingly real even as his backdrops are often odd or extraordinary.

The Darjeeling Limited sees Anderson returning to form after stumbling with The Life Aquatic, a film that bore the superficial marks of an Anderson work but seemed to be faking the heart. Darjeeling is in the mold of Anderson’s triumphs - Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums - in the way it gathers a cast of rather disparate individuals (here as in Tenenbaums, a fragmented family) and makes the audience care about all of them, in spite of their various flaws. Darjeeling is not as good at this as Anderson has been, but it gathers strength as it goes along and ultimately makes for an appealing ride.

When I saw the film it was preceded by Hotel Chevalier, Anderson’s short-film companion piece which adds little to the proceedings aside from giving Star Wars fans everywhere a long-awaited glimpse of Natalie Portman’s nude body. As Darjeeling goes along, there are a few things that are fleshed out having seen Chevalier first, but mostly it feels like another culmination of Anderson’s worst impulses - cute little touches here and there, but no emotional bedrock. Fortunately, Darjeeling is another matter. The relationships between the film’s lead triumvirate ride an emotional roller coaster; first the brothers seem jarred to be in one another’s presence again, and then things deteriorate - even as they try to trust each other, they end up doing it less and less, leading to a big fight that gets them kicked off the titular train.

It’s here that the movie kicks into another gear entirely. Anderson’s films have always been fairly dialogue-heavy, but Darjeeling is often at its best in quieter moments. The three brothers have clearly spent much of their lives talking past each other, as they do for the first 30 or 45 minutes of the film. Once off the train, Francis’ planned itinerary goes out the window, and the film begins to draw out its characters’ emotions in long spells of quiet, where faces and movements are more telling than the words that filled the movie’s first half. Anderson’s casting of Brody pays off particularly well here; a Best Actor winner for a film, The Pianist, in which his character spends much of his time alone and silent, Brody is especially well-suited for this kind of work, and he adds gravitas to the proceedings while still being able to maintain Anderson’s traditional tightrope act between comedy and drama.

All this probably sounds like I loved the film. I did like it - it’s emotionally solid and India provides a colorful backdrop that virtually serves as its own character. With that said, it’s far from perfect. For one thing, it feels rushed; perhaps this is connected to the strong interplay between the characters in the second half, but it seemed to wrap up awfully quickly. For another, while the film has solid character arcs, the narrative itself seems a bit awkward, lurching from plot point to plot point in the second half as if far too eager to reveal what happens next. Given the beauty of the quiet moments, I found myself wishing they could have lingered a bit more, but perhaps Anderson was wrestling with his impulses on this one and just found it too difficult not to move to the next conversation.

It may be a bit scattershot, but The Darjeeling Limited combines strong character work with an interesting setting well enough to give Wes Anderson another winning film. When one of the worst things you can say about a film is that it ended too soon, it’s certainly a pleasant way to spend an hour and a half.