Railroad to nowhere?

 
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One of the most common adjectives to describe the films of Wes Anderson is ‘bittersweet’, and it is perhaps the best single word to describe his latest film, The Darjeeling Limited, written by Anderson, Jason Schwartzman (who also stars in the film) and Roman Coppola. Telling the story of three brothers who begin to experience personal transformation, it is both moving and funny. Anderson was keen to set a film in India, being inspired by the landscape and drawn to the somewhat chaotic way of life there. And, he says, he wanted to make a film on a train because, ‘because I like the idea of a moving location. It goes forward as the story goes forward.’

Peter, Jack and Francis Whitman have not spoken to each other since their father’s funeral. But a serious motorcycle accident makes oldest brother Francis (Owen Wilson) realise that he values his brothers above everything. Still covered in bandages, he decides to summon his brothers to India, believing that a journey on ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ train will enable them to resolve their differences and become close once more. Once they have met on the train, Francis tells them, ‘You’re the two most important people in the world to me,’ and asks them to make an agreement: ‘A. I want us to become brothers again, like we used to be, and for us to find ourselves and bond with each other. . . . B. I want us to make this trip a spiritual journey where each of us seek the unknown and learn about it. . . . C. I want us to be completely open and say yes to everything, even if it’s shocking and painful.’

In order to facilitate the spiritual journey, Francis has had his new assistant, Brendan (Wallace Wolodarsky), produce a detailed schedule. Although Brendan is to keep apart from the brothers, at the other end of the train, each day he is to place an updated schedule under their door with a list of the spiritual places and temples they should see. It soon becomes apparent that Francis is a very controlling personality. As well as planning the itinerary and virtually imposing the agreement on his brothers, he tells them what to do and makes decisions for them, even telling them what they should order for dinner. And yet, there is a vulnerability to his damaged character. His bandages and walking stick emphasise this at a visual level, but it is also glimpsed from time to time in some of the things he says. At one point he asks, ‘Did I raise us? Kind of?’ He is a man who desperately needs acceptance and affirmation, and attempts to impose some order on the world around him in order to feel secure. And yet he also feels the responsibility, as the older brother, to do something to help them all.

Tensions arise between all three brothers, but particularly between Francis and Peter (Adrien Brody). Peter confides to Jack (Jason Schwartzman) that his wife, Alice, is expecting a baby in six weeks, but insists that he doesn’t want Francis to know. Jack later explains to Francis that this secrecy was because they don’t trust each other, but Francis questions Peter about why he doesn’t want to celebrate such good news. Peter confesses that he doesn’t want to talk about it, ‘I guess I always expected eventually I’ll get divorced, so having children really wasn’t part of my plan.’ But he doesn’t know why he thinks this way, because he loves Alice. ‘Maybe it relates to how we were raised,’ he speculates. Adrien Brody says, ‘Peter’s a man searching for answers. I think we’re all looking for answers and I guess some appear and some are never answered and that’s also what happens in this story.’

Jack, a writer who very obviously bases all his ‘fictional’ characters on his family and friends, has his own problems, of course. He is in the aftermath of a difficult relationship (The Darjeeling Limited is intended to be watched after the short film Hotel Chevalier, which gives us one brief encounter between Jack and his girlfriend (Natalie Portman) between the break-up and the train journey), but obsessively rings his ex-girlfriend’s answering machine, for which he still has the code to listen to the messages. After doing so on one occasion, he returns to his brothers and announces, ‘I don’t feel good about myself.’ He is wary of Francis’s plans, so contrary to his older brother’s instructions, he has bought his own ticket, giving him the freedom to leave before the proposed one-month journey is complete.

It seems that the Whitman brothers have brought so much of the baggage of their lives, and so quickly slip back into old patterns of squabbling, that Francis’s carefully laid plans seem doomed to failure. However, when the train ends up lost on the wrong track in the middle of the Rajasthan desert, the brothers begin to engage with India, rather than simply travelling through it while wrapped up in their own concerns. ‘How far off course are we?’ asks Jack. ‘Nobody knows,’ replies Brendan. ‘We haven’t located us yet.’ Francis asks Brendan to repeat what he just said, and then bursts out, ‘Ha! Is that symbolic? We haven’t located us yet.’

The symbolism of the journey, the chaos that surrounds them, the large collection of Louis Vuitton luggage, and being lost in the desert is, indeed, staring us in the face. In the hands of director Wes Anderson, however, such obvious symbolism is amusing without being corny, and prompts us to reflect at multiple levels on what is happening in the lives of these three men. They are on a chaotic but intense journey emotionally and spiritually as well as physically, but the difficulty for them is that they don’t know where they are in order to work out where they’re going. Jack is unable to move on from his disastrous relationship; Peter is unable to talk about the momentous event soon to take place in his life, or fully face his grief over his father’s death; Francis is also unable to deal emotionally with his father’s death; and all of them are hung up over their mother’s disappearance and failure to appear at the funeral.

Eventually, the locations and events in which they find themselves begin to break through and bring about some transformation. Adrien Brody says of his character, ‘Peter comes in contact with so much life in India, it kind of awakens him. I mean the thing about India is that life is very precarious there and everywhere you turn you are seeing people on the verge of death or extraordinary beauty and there is a kind of fluidity to it all – and I think Peter’s denial has prevented him from experiencing these parts of life, until he goes to India.’

The Darjeeling Limited is, like all of Anderson’s work, quirky, stylized in an engaging and accessible way, and full of meaning. Anderson is a very deliberate, thoughtful director with a light touch. His characters may be weird, but there’s a believability about them because of what’s going on under the surface. We may not know anyone quite like these people, but we are probably familiar with some of their struggles, hopes and fears, as well as the various ways in which they are broken or fragile.

Anderson gives us hope for his characters; the experiences they undergo enable them to begin to find meaning or hope or healing. As Francis removes his bandages towards the end of the film, he reflects that he has a long way to go, but Jack comments that is will be good for his character. It’s hard to escape that feeling about all their experiences: they will grow through them. Anderson recognises that life is about the tapestry of positive and negative experiences, and that all of them make us what we are, for good or ill. And he also seems to recognise that there are two immensely important results of this: personal growth and compassion for others who have their own difficulties pressures and hang-ups. Perhaps this is why his films are so often described as bittersweet – because that’s how life is.

What Anderson fails to understand, though, is quite what the spiritual journey is really all about. While the Whitmans sample little snippets of Hinduism in order to try to discover some spiritual connection, it seems that what is really going on in the three brothers is that they discover themselves, and therefore the ability to reach out to others. This is important, and is justifiably called spiritual, yet it is a very shallow understanding of spirituality. Ultimately, a spiritual journey must be about discovering, or growing in, an engagement with spiritual reality. Eastern spirituality continues to be immensely attractive to Westerners looking for something outside of their normal experience which might provide a fix for life, yet without making great challenges. However, Hinduism is, in fact, a religious system which requires constant effort (over many lifetimes) with no guarantees of salvation. In contrast, what is on offer in the good news of Jesus Christ is that God himself reaches out to us and saves us, bringing peace with God which enables reconciliation with others and peace with ourselves. When Jesus says, ‘Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light (Matthew 11:28–30, NLT), it’s exactly what Francis, Peter and Jack need to hear. Personal growth is vital, but even more vital to discover what we were ultimately made for – a relationship with God which transforms all of life. It’s a spiritual journey all of us should be on, but like the train, all too often people are on the wrong track and don’t have a clue where they are or where they’re heading.

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