“The Darjeeling Limited” explores complexities of belief

“I need to get off this train,” says waitress Rita (Amara Karan) in Wes Anderson’s amazing new film, “The Darjeeling Limited,” referring to the train that serves as her workplace and from which this film takes it title.

As Rita is locked in a rather awkward love triangle with a waiter and a passenger when she utters this sentence, it would be fairly easy to say that the train represents some form of existential quandary, some kind of “Waiting for Godot”-esque nightmare from which there is no escape. I have no doubt that this is how Rita herself sees the train, but there are so many conflicting beliefs and ideas floating around that it’s impossible to definitively associate any idea from any school of thought to anything tangible in the film. “The Darjeeling Limited,” then, doesn’t strike as a film loaded with metaphors so much as a film about its characters’ perceptions of metaphors, of life, and how it is that one can “properly” go about attaining inner peace.

Reuniting after nearly a year of silence following the death of their father, the brothers Whitman—Francis (Owen Wilson), Jack (Jason Schwartzman) and Peter (Adrien Brody)—have gathered together on the Darjeeling, which is touring through India on what Francis promises will be a spiritually enlightening journey. Much has changed in the interim: Jack is recoiling from a painful break-up, Peter’s wife is seven-and-a-half months pregnant, and Francis’ face is practically buried underneath a stack of bandages, the result of a severe motorcycle accident that he is unable to recount in full. As the tour continues, it becomes increasingly obvious that the brothers’ relationship is too strained to accommodate such a quest; everyone seems prepared to abandon each other until Francis finally reveals the purpose of this seemingly aimless get-together: he has finally discovered the whereabouts of their mother (Anjelica Huston), who has since become a nun at a convent near the Himalayas, and proposes that they visit her.

At first glance, it appears to be an average roundelay of Wes Anderson’s trademark character quirks: Peter has kept several of his father’s belongings since the day he died, obsessively wearing a pair of prescription glasses that are impossible to see through; Jack, meanwhile, resolves to forget about his long-lost love by smashing a bottle of her favored perfume inside the train compartment, which of course only succeeds in keeping “her smell” pervasive throughout their living quarters. It’s all quite funny in that standard Anderson way, but these scenes take on a different meaning when you realize that these men are expecting to find some relief from their personality disorders in the wonders of the mystical East—despite the fact that they’re really just acting like jackasses, bringing the weight of their neuroses to where it is clearly unwanted. It isn’t until they are confronted with the local customs that surround life and death that they finally learn how foolish they’ve been, forced to reflect on how their own experiences are inconceivably different. This all seems to point to the idea that some artsy moron invading another culture with the egotistical expectation for enlightenment has the capacity to be just as ignorant—and, in this case, damaging to foreign perceptions of Americans—as any gawking tourist or right-wing warmonger. (A convenient mainstream analogy can be found in Wilson’s character from “Zoolander,” a vapid male model who mentions that an excursion abroad “changed our whole perspective on shit.”) More than a simple matter of self-entitlement, however, “The Darjeeling Limited” stresses the importance of serious introspection, and the emphasis of the “personal” in personal beliefs—that the integration of another culture and true “enlightenment” takes more commitment and soul-searching than what a lark through another country can offer.

“The Darjeeling Limited” demonstrates that it thrives on prompting superficial examinations that give way to complex explorations. A lot of the fascinating material that we have seen thus far seems to be thwarted by its off-putting ending, which indulges in a rather painfully obvious treatise about moving on and living life for oneself. I didn’t much care for it myself; the final few minutes seemed like a particularly vulgar literalization of everything that came beforehand. But it wasn’t until I sat down and really thought about it that I realized how perfect it was: by film’s end, the Whitman brothers have finally realized what everyone else has known from the very beginning, and have decided to express this newfound knowledge in the most blatant way possible—which may be the only way they know how. It further deepens the film’s arguments about self-realization, and perhaps even forgives these holy fools for their indiscretions—because Anderson acutely understands the human condition, and the fact that personal hang-ups and delusions can blind anyone from the most obvious truth. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Of course it does.