I loved “The Darjeeling Limited” (which I discuss in the video below) from the very beginning—whether you trace that beginning to the short film “Hotel Chevalier,” starring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman, which preceded the film at its New York Film Festival screenings, or to the scene that culminates in Bill Murray running for a train and being overtaken by a younger man, which began the film at its commercial release—and I was dismayed by the mitigated critical response it received. In my Profile of its director, Wes Anderson, in the magazine this week, I look at the remarkable way the movie was made and at some of the reasons for the critical misunderstanding. In this clip from the movie, I discuss a few of the movie’s many virtues.
I’ve seen it many, many times since that press screening two years ago. It has not only held up but gotten richer; each viewing yields fresh wonders. Anderson’s work resonates with the tension between artifice and nature; in “The Darjeeling Limited,” which was shot on location in India, often in places that defied directorial control, that tension is particularly fruitful. With this film, Anderson returned to the freewheeling energy of “Bottle Rocket,” a road movie about a trio, and to the family dynamics of “The Royal Tenenbaums,” about a trio of siblings. The fraternal and parental relations he depicts here are powerful, deep, and strange, and he induces them with touches that are as witty and subtle as they are moving.
