Cynical Cinema

There is a short film before The Darjeeling Limited called Hotel Chevalier. It is a wonderful addition to a wonderful film. Natalie Portman stars with Jason Schwartzman in the short flim, and she gets very naked. Not that it’s worth it just for that, but it sets up the movie beautifully. Portman is in The Darjeeling Limited for a total of one eighth of one second, so the only time we get to understand what she’s doing there is in Hotel Chevalier. The first shot of the short film is unmistakably Wes Anderson. The giddily coloured hotel lobby is in perfect keeping with his other work - Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Anderson is about the quirkiest and maybe the best director working within the studio system. There are many things that connect his films. First of all, the actors in his movies spend a lot of time sitting perfectly still. There is little movement in the films, and even when there is a scene with action, it seems very understated and the colour of the scene is more engaging than the action itself. Another fixture of a Wes Anderson movie is dysfunctional families, bizarre relationships and aberrant behaviour within those families. The Darjeeling Limited is no exception.

And the third common thread - the actors. Bill Murray has starred in the last three Anderson movies, and he appears here as the first actor we see, running to catch a train. He misses the train, and we never see him again. But at least he shows up. Adrien Brody sprints past Murray to catch that same train (the Darjeeling Limited), and joins Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore) and Owen Wilson (Rushmore, Bottle Rocket, Royal Tenenbaums, Life Aquatic), who are his brothers. They are on this train because Owen Wilson, who appears to be amazingly rich, has decided to bring all three of them together on some kind of bonkers, misguided “spiritual quest”, following the death of their father. Anjelica Huston (Royal Tenenbaums, Life Aquatic) plays their mom, who eventually figures into the story. This journey is totally directionless - to the point that the train, although it is on a track, actually gets lost. None of the brothers truly trust each other, and there is a lot of back-stabbing and gossip going on between them.

There is something extremely childish about Wes Anderson films. Not in subject matter, certainly, but in visual presentation. Every character seems, at the same time, both larger than life and totally insignificant. And so too does the decor on the train, the countryside outside the train, and the layout of the rooms. But the one thing that is consistent about his movies is that they are excellent. Every one of them. There is nothing in Darjeeling Limited that is what DVD boxes would call “laugh-out-loud funny”. But then, the entire thing IS funny. It’s hilariously funny. And it’s the underacting and the overacting, the big reactions to small things and the small reactions to big things, it’s the tone and the setting and the minimal dialogue and the ideas that are in the heads of the characters. Ideas that are rarely spoken but that we know about, and that we find very amusing. Scenes that should be massively dramatic are treated with a certain impassiveness by Anderson - there is a scene toward the end, where the brothers are confronting their mother over some wrongs, and Owen Wilson admits that the bandages that have been around his head the entire movie are the result of a suicide attempt, it’s all passed over so quickly and so astutely that we are still amused, maybe even more so. The Darjeeling Limited won’t appeal to everyone, just like Rushmore and Life Aquatic and Royal Tenenbaums, but it certainly stands with them in terms of excellence.

John C. Reilly is a serious comedic talent.  Normally relegated to the Will Ferrell backburner in movies like Talladega Nights, he has been given a chance to star and to shine in Walk Hard:  The Dewey Cox Story.  And shine he does.  Reilly is easily the best part of this movie, with his understated performance meshing perfectly with the surprisingly understated movie.  As far as parodies go, the people who make all those Epic Movies and Date Movies and Meet The Spartans could take notes from flicks like this one.  Understatement is often far funnier than garish, over-the-top gross-out parody.  There are some terrific lines in Walk Hard, lines like “I’m chopped in half pretty bad here”, which would probably NOT be considered understated were we not inundated with the likes of Scary Movie Eleven and Epic Movie.

 The thing about Walk Hard is that it works on only one real level.  And that is, if you have already seen Walk The Line, the Johnny Cash biopic with Joaquin Phoenix.  If you missed that one, you will miss a lot of the hunour in Walk Hard.  The father’s constant refrain of “the wrong kid died”, the numerous occasions where sinks get destroyed, and the tumultuous relationships Dewey Cox has with various women.  And there are other references the movie makes which only the hardcore music-history and music-DVD fan would understand.  A Brian Wilson moment where Dewey is clearly losing his mind after too much acid, and asks for a twelve-thousand voice choir of Benedictine monks, or some such thing.  A Bob Dylan moment, which is a direct parody of a press conference Dylan gave in 1965 after going electric at Newport.  (That entire press conference, by the way, is available on a DVD called “Dylan Speaks”, and is a must for any Bob Dylan fanatic.)  But these are references the regular public wouldn’t get. 

The stuff they would understand is stuff about Elvis and Buddy Holly and the Beatles.  I think it is safe to assume that the general public, if they are even in passing familiar with this music, know that Elvis was the King, Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, and the Beatles went to India for spiritual guidance from the Maharishi.   But that’s about all there is for the casual observer, which might help to explain why this movie didn’t find a larger audience upon it’s release.  Oh, it did OK, but it is superior in many ways to those Will Ferrell movies that do gigantic bank every time they are released.  Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro, Elf…Walk Hard is better than all of these, but just sadly inaccessible to many people.  The one thing though, I think, that everyone would be able to agree on is that the songs are terrific.  Every song sounding exactly like the era which it is meant to parody, every one hilarious and smart.  That might be the best way to determine if you will like this movie.  Listen to the soundtrack, and if it amuses you, so too will the film.