Short Takes
THE DARJEELING LIMITED In Wes Anderson’s new film, the estranged brothers Whitman reunite aboard a colorful old locomotive traversing the Rajasthan region of India. Along the way, they shop for souvenirs, take in the sights, and wonder where, exactly, they’re destined to arrive. Each Whitman has a multitude of hurt—and a signature look. Jack (Jason Schwartzman), the youngest, mourns a recent breakup and tends to go barefoot in expensive suits. With oversized sunglasses and pink boxers, middle child Peter (Adrien Brody) broods over a coming baby from a woman he isn’t sure he should have married. Francis (Owen Wilson) wears a crown of gauze over injuries physical and otherwise. (From the minute Wilson walks onscreen, Darjeeling is warped by the gravitas of his recent suicide attempt.) Individually damaged and isolated in their styles, the Whitman boys share one thing: luggage designed by Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton. Literalizing the brothers’ emotional baggage is an awfully blunt conceit, and one that points directly to what works and what doesn’t in Darjeeling. Anderson half-succeeds in escaping the impasse of his last picture, The Life Aquatic, the first where his extravagant sense of whimsy—storybook set, color-coded costumes, yearning pop songs—failed to carry emotion and so flailed as mere (and maddening) mannerism. That stumble may have been unavoidable on the heels of The Royal Tenenbaums—a high triumph of tragicomic imagination where style and feeling are inextricable, mutually dependent—but here, the impossible-to-micromanage milieu forces a somewhat looser grip on the material, resulting in a story that pitches from the dramatically precise to the skittishly farcical. A companion piece to Tenenbaums more than a step in new directions, Darjeeling is a movie about people trapped in themselves and what it takes to get free—a movie, quite literally, about letting go of your baggage. —Nathan Lee (Opens Friday)
BELLA The audience award winner at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Bella is already getting some buzz among Catholics and pro-lifers in the blogosphere, who’ve pinned it as the crossover anti-abortion hit they’ve been waiting for. But director Alejandro Gomez Monteverde has so little control of tone or nuance that even the most tragic moments here come off as melodramatic jokes. (During the screening I attended, nearly the entire theater burst out laughing at a child’s violent death.) His main character, Jose (Eduardo Verastegui), a Jesus-haired hottie with sad eyes and a sad secret, works as a (preternaturally talented yet modest) chef in his brother’s New York restaurant. When streetwise co-worker Nina (Tammy Blanchard) is fired for her chronic lateness (guess what: she’s actually pregnant), Jose takes her out for a day at the beach and tries to dissuade her from getting an abortion. Does she? If you can’t tell by now how this movie ends, I won’t spoil it, except to say that it manages to be utterly predictable without making any sense at all. —Julia Wallace (Opens Friday)
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