Derek Hill is the author of the new book Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood’s Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers, now available in the U.K. (Amazon | Waterstone’s | Blackwell ) and out soon in the U.S. ( Amazon ). He has agreed to write several pieces for the Academy. This is part 2; Derek has decided to offer the section of the book on TDL in its entirety. Enjoy!

‘Is that symbolic?  We.  Haven’t.  Located.  Us.  Yet!’
– Francis Whitman (Owen Wilson) has his mind blown when he realises that the train he and his brothers have been passengers on is lost.

Anderson has never been averse to addressing mortality head-on in his films, specifically the death of a spouse (Rushmore), parent (The Royal Tenenbaums) or child (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou).  Although all of his films are ostensibly comedies, there has always been an element of the impermanence of things, of people, that has delicately coaxed an emotional resonance forth from the wackiness.  Not particularly original or groundbreaking, but when one considers the frequently bathetic treatment of death in much of American mainstream cinema, Anderson’s unsentimental and realistic treatment of grief is a commendable aspect and intrusion upon his lucid, intensely fabricated theatricality.  As much as Anderson has become a master of the elaborate multi-layered mise-en-scene, he also astutely understands the moment to drop back, allowing his characters to feel the brunt of their sorrow without excessive ornamentation.  The Darjeeling Limited is as waggish as any of Anderson’s previous work.  But at its core is the black hole of loss, the invisible thread that binds us as profoundly (if not more so) than birth.

By this point, it’s impossible to remain neutral about the films of Wes Anderson.  You either find his work ‘precocious’, ‘quirky’, ’self-conscious’ and ‘unfunny’ or delight in their finely crafted intentional artificiality, heightened realism, exaggerated characters and open-hearted emotion.  The Darjeeling Limited is not a major departure from Anderson’s previous work, but it is the most focused, relaxed and stripped-down production since Bottle Rocket, while still delivering the same visual hallmarks and familiar themes that he has obsessed over throughout his career.  It’s also his most mature film to date – a discerning trip into matters of frayed fraternal obligation and the possibility of friendship beyond the bloodline.

Written by Anderson, Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, the film focuses on three brothers, all typically Andersonian adult-children of indeterminate wealth and privilege (like characters out of a 1930s screwball comedy), who have not been in contact with one another since the death of their father a year earlier, but have now reunited to take a train trip through India in order to mend their relationship and find enlightenment.  Francis, the de facto leader of the group, still healing from an attempted suicide attempt, tries to micromanage their every move with a daily itinerary made up by Francis’ assistant Brendan (Wallace Wolodarsky) who travels with the group but in a different compartment of the train.  The daily plans, which are always laminated and slipped underneath the cabin door, instruct the brothers as to what holy temples to visit and when to eat, rigidly defining the brothers’ every movement.  Peter (Adrien Brody), the married one of the group and a reluctant expecting father, is also the brother closest to making a significant belated leap into full adulthood because of his impending role as a parent.  And then there is Jack the lothario, a heartsick literary writer who has spent the last few months living in exile in a swanky Parisian hotel after suffering a painful breakup with his girlfriend (Natalie Portman), which is the subject of the short film Hotel Chevalier that serves as a significant and telling prologue to The Darjeeling Limited.

But the brothers’ ’spiritual journey’ is fraught with comical miscalculations, arguments and painful recriminations that eventually find the three men kicked off the train and alone in the wilds of India.  Stripped of their pretensions of enlightenment, comfort and wealth, they reach rock bottom when a tragic incident sweeps them out of their own neurosis, forcing them to confront their own fragile predicament.  The journey does not end there, though.  Unbeknownst to Jack or Peter, Francis intends to lead them to their estranged mother (Anjelica Huston) who is now a nun living in an abbey in the shadow of the Himalayas (a nod to Michael Powell’s 1947 film Black Narcissus), despite her refusal to see them because of a man-eating tiger in the area.

Much of the film, especially in the second half, plays like a feminised seriocomic take on Apocalypse Now, with the brothers journeying toward their confrontation with mom – complete with unforeseen detours both ludicrous and dire – who they feel has somehow betrayed them for failing to attend their father’s funeral and willingly isolating herself from the world, like some selfish though charitable Colonel Kurtz.  But the brothers’ plans are thwarted yet again when she dismisses their accusations as selfish and wrong, opening the doorway to a hopeful tabula rasa.  The Whitman brothers are really searching for meaning, a glimmer of understanding within the fog of the past and their inability to steer through it with clear eyes.  Only when their mission is taken out of their hands, ‘to be continued’ as their mother intones before bedtime and then disappears from their lives again (she goes off to kill the tiger), are the brothers free at last to decide their own failure or success.  There are no pithy resolutions at the end of the journey, no profound moment of clarity.  There is just the realization that one is alive in the moment and that a new journey awaits where one unexpectedly ends.  After the brothers are abandoned at the abbey, they climb a mountain and improvise a ritual of their new bond (something they attempted to do earlier in the film to comical results) before literally jumping aboard a train bound for new adventures.

The light and space of India generates a new palette for Anderson to draw from, adding a dusty grit and dimension to his usual meticulous design schemes.  It’s a welcome looseness, as is the incorporation of music cues pulled from numerous films of Satyajit Ray (whose films made Anderson want to film in India in the first place) and Merchant-Ivory which adds an appropriate organic texture that Anderson’s regular music composer Mark Mothersbaugh would not have been able to reproduce.  And while Anderson’s beloved The Rolling Stones and The Kinks are represented – the use of the Stones’ ‘Playing with Fire’ during the silent reconciliation sequence between the brothers and their mother is a sublimely virtuosic moment – the usual British Invasion stylings are kept to a minimum.

After its premiere at the Venice and New York film festivals, the film opened to initially strong US box office and received some of the best reviews for one of Anderson’s pictures, many finding it a welcome return to form after the perceived failures of The Life Aquatic. But with the praise came the requisite scorn, including accusations of racism, namely from Slate writer Jonah Weiner who blasted the film as Anderson’s ‘most obnoxious movie yet’.[i]  Admittedly race has sometimes been a tricky issue in Anderson’s films, even though he consistently uses large ensemble multi-ethnic casts.  There is an air of cultural exoticism to the portrayal of minorities that can often come across as patronizing because Anderson consistently simplifies them as inherently good people.  However, what makes the accusations hollow is the fact that Anderson views all of his characters through the same elastic comedic lens, not turning them into caricatures so much as exaggerating the inherent goodness he sees within all of his misfits, much like Renoir, Truffaut and Charles M. Schulz did in their own ways.  And if that is an artistic crime, then Anderson is guilty as charged.

[i] Weiner, Jonah, ‘How Wes Anderson Mishandles Race’, Slate, September 27 2007, http://www.slate.com/id/2174828/pagenum/all/

Thanks, Elaine. Posted on our Facebook group.

February 25, 2008, DVD review by Richard Brody (link)

It’s unjust that the Academy didn’t nominate Wes Anderson’s “The Darjeeling Limited” (Fox) in any category, but inexplicable that they didn’t invent a special one for it: Best Luggage. An exquisite set of suitcases, credited to Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton, plays a large role in this blissful, loopy comedy of family anguish and sublimated tenderness.

The film’s subject is coming home, and it’s a sign of Anderson’s comic genius that it takes a picaresque jaunt through India by three brothers, estranged since their father’s funeral a year ago, to do so. The domineering Francis (Owen Wilson), who is recovering from a motorcycle accident, has convened the other two—Peter (Adrien Brody), a regular guy in a panic over the impending birth of his first child, and Jack (Jason Schwartzman), a literary romantic trapped in a troubled relationship—for a “spiritual journey,” which he plans down to the minute.

The trip brings odd misadventure, off-kilter romance, and sudden danger, but the real story involves coming to terms with a lifetime of ingrained resentments plus grief of more recent vintage. For Anderson, such troubles are too big to blurt out without bathos and ridicule. Following other Wasp modernists such as Hemingway and Howard Hawks, he relies on high style, sly gestures, and arch pranks to evoke intense emotion with bite and grace. His tight, sketchlike structures bring out the best in his actors, especially Schwartzman (who co-wrote the script with Anderson and Roman Coppola), a Dustin Hoffman for our time, who doles out Zen wisdom with a carnal leer. In Anderson’s world of brothers without sisters, the ribald rituals of male bonding suggest the unfathomable otherness of women—including the trio’s mother (Anjelica Huston), whose life haunts them no less than their father’s death and who turns out to be the real reason for their trip.

Where people prove elusive, material things play an outsized, totemic role. The brothers’ grudges emerge in their wrangling over their father’s relics—glasses, keys, toiletries—but pride of place goes to his luggage. Dark tan, finely tooled, and adorned with a faux-naïf intaglio of wild animals, it follows them around on their journey at great inconvenience, a perfect, literal metaphor for their heavy emotional baggage.

The film begins with a neat dose of backstory: a short preface, featuring Jack holed up in a luxurious Paris hotel before his passage to India, where he receives a surprise visit from the woman he adores (Natalie Portman, chomping a toothpick, her hair cropped martially short). Movingly, stoically, whimsically, Anderson suggests the difficult self-restraint and self-mastery that the most intimate relationships demand. Love, in his book, is tolerance and acceptance—facing up to pain in order to take the pleasure that’s given.

Francis Ford Coppola’s magazine dedicated to short fiction and one-act plays, Zoetrope All-Story, has published the screenplay for Wes Anderson’s short film Hotel Chevalier in their Winter 2007 edition. You can purchase the issue for $8.00 on the Zoetrope website.

(thanks to Brian)

But where do you go to my lovely
When you’re alone in your bed
Tell me the thoughts that surround you
I want to look inside your head, yes I do

(thanks to the Criterion Forum)

Sadly, it appears to be a Fox Home Entertainment release, not a Criterion Collection DVD.

Thread: “DVD” at the Yankee Racers forum

Wes Anderson burst onto the American Indie scene in 1996 with his first feature film Bottle Rocket which also introduced the world to Luke and Owen Wilson. Cementing his reputation as the Godfather of Quirk with films like Rushmore, The Life Aquatic and The Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson returns to screens this year with The Darjeeling Limited, about a trio of brothers who take a train journey through India and discover more about themselves and each other than perhaps they’d ever hoped for. He talks to Rotten Tomatoes.

Where did the idea for the film come from originally?

Wes Anderson: Initially I had two ideas; one that I wanted to make a movie in India and the second one was that I had this idea about a movie with three brothers on a train together. I mixed them together and they became The Darjeeling Limited.

The other main idea I think was that I thought I’d like to write with Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman and I think the movie we wound up making is really the combination of all three of our points of view mixed together.

Your movies are renowned for their fantastical edge, but when you think about them the stories you tell are always quite down to earth. Does the fantasy come after the idea?

WA: You know, it all sort of happens together I think. The movies I make tend not to be quite reality but the characters are inspired by real people and they’re always very personal. This movie, for instance, is a very personal movie; everything comes from my experiences, or Jason’s or Roman’s experiences. That was really our goal and it’s always been important to us that’s it’s both personal to us and hopefully personal for other people. That’s the idea!

I can’t imagine seeing the film without having seen Hotel Chevalier, your short prologue, first. Why didn’t it proceed the film in the US?

WA: Well it’s just been added to the print in the US from this week, actually. And I think that’s just as well because the short gives you some information and clues. Questions that get answered within the movie. In America I thought people would get to see it on iTunes – I thought everyone who wanted to see it would get to see it – but it’s just been a sort of puzzle for me.

I believe you’re entering the world of animation for your next project.

WA: Yes, we’re doing an animated film; an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book The Fantastic Mr. Fox. We’ve just started it and George Clooney plays Mr. Fox. We’re making it here in London and it’s stop-motion adaptation. I wrote the script with Noah Baumbach who made The Squid and the Whale. It’ll take some time!

It’s a new area for you to explore; how are you finding it?

WA: It is and I like it, it’s fun. It’s fun to do an animated movie and I really enjoyed writing the script with Noah. The thing with animation is that you record the actors like a radio show and then the animators become actors in their own way because it’s their job to take this puppets and make them seem alive. They bring their own personalities to the way they move these puppets.

You’ve always seemed very open to experimentation on your films and it seems like some moments happened spontaneously on set. How does that work in animation?

WA: Well for this film we recorded all the voices on locations. We went out in a forest, we went in an attic, we went in a stable. We went underground for some things. There was a great spontaneity in the recordings because of that, I think.

And then the animators bring their own spontaneity to it as well, because when they do a take of a shot it really is like just one continuous activity for them. They launch into it and do it, and they’re not even quite sure how it’s going to turn out when they’re doing it. They’re sort-of sculpting their way through a scene and trying to make this inanimate object alive.

So while it seems more rigid, you actually get two passes at that spontaneity.
How involved are you in the actual animation process?

WA: My job is first to write the script, and then to record and edit the voices. And then I’m responsible for designing the environment and I have an art director I’m working with on that, costume designers and character designers. There are different people who are in charge of these departments. And then I work on planning the shots and the storyboards. There’s a guy named Marc Gustavson who’s the director of animation, and he’s the one who really will take this puppets and make them seem alive and he oversees a team of animators. So I have my own ideas about what to do there, but he brings a great deal of experience into that and he’s really the guy who’s in charge when the puppets start moving around.

From shooting on a moving train to a fully-fledged animation project; are you always looking for the next challenge as a director?

WA: I don’t really look for challenges as much as I like adventures. Other than that I’m just trying to find stories I want to tell. This one is about foxes and badgers and so it has to be animated in one way or another. India, I just wanted to work there. They bring their own challenges. The hardest project I’ve done was The Life Aquatic; working at sea is a huge challenge.

“All Aboard the Mystery Train” (select passages)

IF WES Anderson was a shopkeeper he would deal in curiosities, junk and antiques: elephant’s foot hat-stands, dollhouses and model trains, and records, on vinyl, in protective PVC envelopes. In the American sense of the word, he is a thrift-store filmmaker, operating away from the main drag, just out of town, and taking great pleasure in the everyday stuff most people don’t value….

And it is a beautiful trip, pitched somewhere between The Monkees and an early Jim Jarmusch movie, with flickers of silent comedy thrown in. Oddly, amid such conspicuous design, much of the dialogue feels improvised, but the film does meander towards a point: something to do with forgiveness and acceptance, and the unspoken ties of brotherhood. But with Anderson, the point isn’t really the point.

Wes Anderson will be awarded the Stockholm Film Festival’s Visionary Award next month.

He has made lasting impressions through his unique ways of using scenography and subtle humour in film successes such as “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Rushmore.” (link)

Bravo, Swedes!
Be sure to check out The Onion’s A/V Club “Random Rules” feature with Jason Schwartzman and Randall Poster. Yankee Racer Loraxaeon explains the concept:

It’s a feature where they have people just hit random on their iPods and tell them what song comes up and explain why they like it, etc. (thread)

Be sure to enter our First Annual Wes Anderson Inspired Halloween Costume Contest… you could win a Darjeeling Limited prize package!

Finally, The Darjeeling Limited opens nationwide this weekend. Hotel Chevalier will be playing as well. I leave you with the words of fellow Yankee Racer slint:

I just got back from seeing it, finally. Interestingly, Hotel Chevalier did play beforehand, and I’m glad it did. Frankly, having seen the film, I can’t imagine why the studio had pulled it originally.

So…I loved the film. It was such a relief, after my experience with TLA. It flowed so much more naturally, and just carried me along, rather than dragging me. I agree with the Bottle Rocket comparisons; it did feel like Francis is a logical extension of Dignan. His laminated itinerary reminded me of Dignan’s spiral notebook with plans for 6 months, 1 year, 10 years, etc. Overall, this film was just a joy to experience. I had a permasmile, and seriously felt giddy a few times. This totally reaffirmed my love of Sir Anderson’s films…. This was a confident and graceful return to the saddle. Bravo. (thread)

Conclusion: Bravo Swedes, Wes Anderson, and slint.

Updates:

Jason Schwartzman appeared on Live 105.3’s “Wild Ass Circus Show,” Houston/Ft Worth (videos).

IMDB has rescinded an earlier report that Natalie Portman was unhappy with her nude scene in Hotel Chevalier:

UPDATE: A U.S. magazine has been forced to apologize to actress Natalie Portman after suggesting she’s far from happy with her performance in short film Hotel Chevalier. Sunday supplement Parade stated Portman was talking about the movie, in which she appears nude, when she commented about an “uncomfortable” scene she shot in a forthcoming essay she wrote for the publication. But the actress’ publicist, Kelly Bush, has pounced on Parade, insisting her client was actually talking about a torture scene in new film Goya’s Ghosts. A statement from the magazine’s publicist reads, “We say that Portman regrets doing a nude scene in the movie Hotel Chevalier. This is wrong. When Portman writes about this in Parade, she does not mention a specific movie title. She tells us she was referring to a torture scene with a body double in Goya’s Ghosts, which was taken out of context and leaked onto the Internet. Portman is very happy with Hotel Chevalier and proud of her work in the film.” In her essay, Portman admits she is still rather upset about agreeing to do something she felt awkward about, writing, “I’m really sorry I didn’t listen to my intuition. From now on, I’m going to trust my gut more.” (link) (thread)

asap Story
asap Videos

The Darjeeling Limited goes national, with Hotel Chevalier, this weekend!

And Hotel Chevalier is one of the many mysteries in The Darjeeling Limited, according to USA TODAY.

“Are the three brothers — Francis, Jack and Peter (played by Wilson, Schwartzman and Brody, respectively) — inspired by the film legends Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson and Peter Bogdanovich?

Close but not quite, Anderson says. Jack is actually named for Schwartzman’s father, not Nicholson. “We named the (Wilson) character after Roman’s father, and Peter … well, I’d like to give that to Peter Bogdanovich because he’s my friend.”

Fox Searchlight Pictures

We are organizing our First Annual Wes Anderson Inspired Halloween Costume Contest. Thanks to our good friends over at Fox Searchlight, we will have some great prize packages, featuring those ever-coveted marketing items from The Darjeeling Limited. We will have more details very soon (including the exact contents of the prize packages). Direct enquiries to halloween@yankeeracers.org. Who will you be? Peter Whitman? Max Fischer? Steve Zissou? Wes Anderson himself? Bob Yeoman? Dart Boy?

Do note that we will have a special “Darjeeling Limited” category. And, please spread the word!

–

We are reporting about the addition of Hotel Chevalier to The Darjeeling Limited print and the weekend box office at the Yankee Racers forum.

Also, please check out the big Darjeeling feature at Premiere.com.

Glenn Kenny sits down with Wes, Roman, Jason, Adrien, and Amara.

Finally, the New York Times has an article on Hotel Chevalier:

 Nancy Utley, a chief operating officer of Fox Searchlight, said that her company did not even know about the short until “The Darjeeling Limited” was completed. Even though Fox was aware of the critical acclaim, the company decided not to release it along with the feature. She said Fox decided to remain “flexible” on what to do.

“We thought it would be too challenging to moviegoers to be exposed to the short in theaters right at the beginning of the run,” she said. “We wanted to make sure ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ got established first as a movie.”

With the wider release looming and “Darjeeling Limited” doing small business at the box office (just over $2.5 million so far), it seemed the obvious choice to include the film’s more popular little sibling as a bonus. Fox Searchlight also is hoping the short is Oscar-worthy and plans to promote it as a contender in the best live-action short category.