2008 Woodie Awards
the reel critic
Julie Lipson
Issue date: 12/6/07 Section: Arts
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SHOW |The Darjeeling Limited
DIRECTOR | Wes Anderson
STARRING | Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody and Jason Swartzman
Everybody likes Wes Anderson. We all love "Rushmore," "The Life Aquatic" and Anderson's fresh, unusually engaging aesthetic that always has moments of startling beauty. However, "The Darjeeling Limited" made me question if there is such a thing as too much Wes Anderson. In his latest movie about three brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody, Jason Schwartzman) who travel through India on a spiritual quest, Anderson's classic aesthetic strangeness is taken to a whole new level. It's as if Anderson had paid his dues making movies with plots and now has enough credit to his name to do whatever he wants - and he wants to do "The Darjeeling Limited" - a movie that rockets its audience into a full-on, aestheticized world. However, for all the film's intense color and quirky situations, "The Darjeeling Limited" leaves behind structure, plot and a badly needed backbone.
Coming out of the theatre, I asked a kid who hadn't seen an Anderson film before what he thought of the film. "I enjoyed watching it," he said, "but I didn't really know what the point was." That about summed it up for me too. The movie was kind of like a two-hour music video. By all means it was a hip music video with a big budget, but I could never see taking apart the plot points in a screenwriting class, because there really weren't many.
While "Rushmore," for example, had the same kind of visual freshness, its bold aesthetic was more successful because Anderson used it with a lot more moderation. When the movie came out in 1998, Anderson was a relatively new filmmaker with a stylized vision who didn't have the notoriety to push the envelope. The result was a unorthodox, highly visual style used to illustrate a thought-out story and well-rounded characters. Films like "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums" were so successful because they approached reality with a surreal quirkiness - the combination of the two allowing for a sincerity that more realistic images fall short of evoking.
DIRECTOR | Wes Anderson
STARRING | Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody and Jason Swartzman
Everybody likes Wes Anderson. We all love "Rushmore," "The Life Aquatic" and Anderson's fresh, unusually engaging aesthetic that always has moments of startling beauty. However, "The Darjeeling Limited" made me question if there is such a thing as too much Wes Anderson. In his latest movie about three brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody, Jason Schwartzman) who travel through India on a spiritual quest, Anderson's classic aesthetic strangeness is taken to a whole new level. It's as if Anderson had paid his dues making movies with plots and now has enough credit to his name to do whatever he wants - and he wants to do "The Darjeeling Limited" - a movie that rockets its audience into a full-on, aestheticized world. However, for all the film's intense color and quirky situations, "The Darjeeling Limited" leaves behind structure, plot and a badly needed backbone.
Coming out of the theatre, I asked a kid who hadn't seen an Anderson film before what he thought of the film. "I enjoyed watching it," he said, "but I didn't really know what the point was." That about summed it up for me too. The movie was kind of like a two-hour music video. By all means it was a hip music video with a big budget, but I could never see taking apart the plot points in a screenwriting class, because there really weren't many.
While "Rushmore," for example, had the same kind of visual freshness, its bold aesthetic was more successful because Anderson used it with a lot more moderation. When the movie came out in 1998, Anderson was a relatively new filmmaker with a stylized vision who didn't have the notoriety to push the envelope. The result was a unorthodox, highly visual style used to illustrate a thought-out story and well-rounded characters. Films like "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums" were so successful because they approached reality with a surreal quirkiness - the combination of the two allowing for a sincerity that more realistic images fall short of evoking.
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