Once upon a time, in a land called “college”, I dated a wealthy white boy from Arizona. He was a nice boy, with nice parents who rushed to embrace and accept me. I was young and eager to be embraced. Trouble was, his mom had an odd way of tacking on an explanation (sometimes sotto voce, sometimes not) to anything “cultural” whenever she addressed me. Implicit in every conversation was the assumption that they would refine me, expose me to the better things in life, elevate me somehow. I shrugged it off time and again until the weight of all that well-intentioned condescension finally felt too crushing: for god’s sake, high art to this family meant Monet’s fucking Water Lillies!! They spent gobs of money on interior designer who made them buy a pool table swathed in beige felt!
I would stand there in my thrift or Army-Navy surplus wear and thrill at the fact that I was secretly turning up my unrefined nose at them, a giant thought-balloon screaming “TACKY!!” rising above my head. I didn’t say anything because it was all so deliciously meta. Also? I was a chicken-shit people-pleaser.
So, anyway, it’s been a great many years since I dumped the guy, but seeing Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited brought on some strange flashbacks.
I’m a sucker for cinematography. Great art direction and visual flair can supplant character development, direction, or even plot, as far as I’m concerned. So naturally, I’ve been a rather ardent Wes Anderson fan. His stilted little diorama-like movies were fine by me. I accepted his narcissistic, self-involved characters because I was watching Anderson’s carefully constructed little world, and if the darker/foreign people were always a little goofy, and not really treated all that well by the main characters, well, that’s alright, right? His world, his prerogative, and all that. Besides, the soundtracks were so great!
Until The Darjeeling Limited. The story, in a nutshell, involves three brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody, Jason Schwartzman) who have lost touch with each other since their father’s death a year ago, and meet up on the Darjeeling Limited train in India. The oldest, Francis Whitman (Wilson) summoned his younger brothers for a “spiritual journey” with the hope of bonding again, as well as another, hidden, agenda. More reviews here.
WARNING: SPOILERS!
Anderson takes the bold (for him) step of pushing his characters (literally) out of his little constructed world (the train) and into the real world (India). But the “real world” is still not even slightly fucking real! It’s Anderson’s cutesy, nostalgia-for-the-colonies, anglophilic, imaginary take on India. It’s like he ran out of colors to paint his scenes with, so he set them India, cause it’s already, you know, “colorful”. It’s like he took criticisms of his previous films to heart, so he set out to make something meaningful, in India, cause it’s so, you know, “spiritual.”
This movie is to India what The Life Aquatic was to oceanography.
A controversial recent article in Slate magazine (memorably subtitled, “That Queasy Feeling You Get When Watching a Wes Anderson Movie”) accused the director of being racist.
Much like that well-intentioned Arizona family I once knew, I don’t think Anderson means to be, at all. And I’m still eager to be embraced: I get that the brothers’ behavior and comments as they travel are supposed to cast them in a bad light, as clueless, careless, egocentric, shallow American asswipes. But the director is far too fond of them for this condemnation to really stick. They get a chance at redemption when, thrown off the train (for bringing aboard a poisonous snake and promptly losing it) in the Indian countryside, they try to save three drowning boys. Two are rescued, but despite much thrashing around in the water, a bloodied Adrian Brody admits, “I couldn’t save mine.” Mine. The word got caught in my ear canal and kept pinging against my ear drum. Mine.
Here’s the Slate writer’s take on it:
They’re invited to the child’s rural village for his funeral (which Anderson cannot resist presenting in slow motion and setting to a Kinks song), where the Whitman clan realize that they need to stick together and see out the rest of their journey. Turns out that a dead Indian boy was all the brothers were missing.
This isn’t just heavy-handed, it’s offensive. In a grisly little bit of developing-world outsourcing, the child does the bothersome work of dying so that the American heroes won’t have to die spiritually.
I want to say that Anderson isn’t this callow, that the writer is over-reacting, that humor or quirkiness or something leavens the scene from such harsh judgment. But I can’t. Adrian Brody and Owen Wilson are captivating actors, and deliver performances that almost transcend the material. Brody’s shocked face and wet eyes almost won me over as he delivered that line. But still. Mine.
Irfan Khan plays the dead boy’s humble-peasant father, and in fewer than five lines, is supposed to convey the sort of parental love that the Whitman boys (who am I kidding. These are men. They should have pulled up their big-boy pants long ago) are so desperately seeking. He manages to pull it off, too. A horrible waste of an amazing actor.
Oh, and I almost forgot about Amara Karan, the Sri Lankan Brit who plays a hot-to-trot “Sweet Lime” stewardess on the train. (Yes, I know. Stewardess on a train. Like I said, his world). The youngest brother has an on-board affair with her, if “affair” means humping in train toilets. I mean, I’m all for liberated South Asian women and all, but NONE of the women I know would consider such a thing for a second. In an Indian train bathroom, no less. She is supposed to be “searching” or something too. I guess. Who knows, since she barges into their cabin to sneak cigarettes, makes cryptic comments about maybe having a boyfriend, and doesn’t seem to mind when Owen Wilson calls her “Sweet Lime” all th time. Mostly she’s there to flash her enormous eyes and sprinkle some sassy-sexy mystique.
Sidenote: A friend attended the casting call for this character two years ago. She gigglingly reported back to me that in the script the stewardess is first seen through a partially open bathroom door, “zipping up her sari”. Thankfully they changed this to a salwar kameez/ kurta pajama like thing in the finished movie.
On top of all this, Anderson’s usual quirks and tics are starting to get stale. Darjeeling uses the same blue and yellow color scheme as The Life Aquatic, includes a bandage unwrapping scene that looks (and functions) exactly like the head-shaving scene in The Royal Tennenbaums, recycles the same Kinks-heavy soundtrack as Rushmore, the Indian stewardess is like the maid from Paraguay in Bottle Rocket, the list goes on. A flashback to the Whitman father’s funeral (actually, the journey to the funeral. They never actually get there, either) plays like it was meant to be slapstick with undercurrents of poignancy, but the actors just look lost.
Waris Ahluwalia plays the train conductor/manager. He’s magnificently stern and imposing. I’d like to think that he provides a foil for the brothers, as someone their age who’s a proper adult. But maybe that’s just me still eager to spin this so I can convince myself that Anderson’s movies are worth watching. A great interview with Ahluwalia here. Moments of awesomeness abound, as when he tackles confronts a turban’n’beard question head on:
When did people start noticing you on street and saying, “Hey, you’re that dude from…”He also takes on the Slate.com article:
It started happening after Inside Man. It’s interesting how different people come up to you depending on where you are. In the weirdest places—security guards, delivery guys—it started happening. People on the street being really excited. They’re very sweet about it.
It’s interesting how that happened in your case. People who gawk at movie stars on the street often notice how they differ from their onscreen personas. Physically, at least, you don’t look different from the characters you’ve played.
Tell me what you mean by that.
Just that you wear a turban and have a beard—like in the movies that you’ve appeared in.
Oh yeah.
Since you bring it up, can you address the recent Slate magazine article accusing Wes of “fetishizing” India in Darjeeling? He cites several examples, such as the scene when Francis (Owen Wilson) gets his shoes stolen by an Indian boy and remarks, “I love these people.”
[laughs] Really. I didn’t even know about that. Good old Slate. I think that’s the writer projecting his own feelings. We knew that was racist. It’s the character. It’s done to agitate Owen’s character. When you go into a foreign country, you run that risk. Wes treated the country beautifully, in terms of how he shot it. It’s earnest and honest. The films of Satyajit Ray are something that he loves. He got really into it. So why is it fetishistic in a bad way? We all fetishize things. Maybe he did.
It’s good to hear that from you. Obviously, Wes wouldn’t help his case if he tried to defend the charges.
Yeah, he’d be like, “I’m not racist. I have an Indian friend.” It’s like saying, “My friend’s black.” But, you know, I know him. He’s curious about cultures and experiences, and he was drawn in by those films he saw—the magic of them. Everyone has a tendency—not just this writer from Slate, god bless him—we look at everything through our own eyes. Sure, it could be construed as racist. I won’t argue with you there. You can look at anything out of context, and it’s going to be racist. I think there might be racist things in Spike’s movie, but I’m not sure. [laughs] Someone needed a good angle for their story. And that’s a good angle! I commend him on his story. These are good things to explore. That’s fine. It’s an opinion. But he’s talking about someone who I know and have spent a great deal of time with over five years—I know that’s not him.
You probably would’ve realized it by now.
Either that, or I’m just lying to myself.
