American film director Wes Anderson: that dude’s got a knack for visual style coming out of his nose, and probably other orifices, too. I love movies that can transport you to another world for a couple of hours. Give me bright colors and bad hair and a quirky soundtrack anytime, because I freely admit that I am to shiny media as a raccoon is to tinfoil.

What are these men up to? Should we care?

So I eagerly saw Wes Anderson’s newest movie, The Darjeeling Limited, last weekend and I walked out feeling kind of “meh” but also uneasy. I loved Bottle Rocket and Rushmore and even The Royal Tenenbaums, which provoked critics into slamming him somewhat for being in a rut with his style and themes. What was bothering me about this movie, exactly?

I still liked what Anderson was doing, though. I had faith that he was going to grow as a director and tackle something besides families who were busted in a very particular and sordidly-glamorous way. I thought he could have done more, story-wise, with The Life Aquatic, but I still enjoyed being at sea (ho ho) in that weird world for a little while.

But Darjeeling is the one that lost me. The main characters were unlikeable, which can work. For example, in Good Will Hunting, the main character is basically a tool, but somehow I was still pulling for him to overcome his obstacles to work through that toolishness a little. Of course, I saw that ten years ago, so maybe I just have less patience for cute jerks now.

Darjeeling has a classic story—the quest for meaning—told with the Quirk-O-Meter set up to eleven (per usual for Anderson). The main characters in Darjeeling are three American brothers on a train trip through India to achieve some kind of spiritual enlightenment, and a reconnection with each other in the wake of their father’s death. But they are (obviously, deliberately) jerks. There are moments that are funny, and moments where you suspect you should be feeling something, but you don’t quite get there (kind of like the brothers). In the end, when a “real” event occurs that causes the main characters to feel something, I didn’t care anymore.

Amanda Marcotte summarizes the feeling I had very well:

Anderson makes absolutely sure the audience dislikes these three, despite the fact that the actors themselves are likeable. They’re petulant and shallow, brag about how much money they have and how they casually globe-trot, wander around poverty-stricken India like kings, are casually misogynist, and ungrateful for people’s kindnesses to them. They’re also intellectually incurious about the religion they’re supposedly in India to learn about, a trait which is played with more subtle humor than I would have suspected it. In sum, they’re the absolute epitome of the Ugly American, and I kept hoping they’d get robbed and all their dozen suitcases laden with overpriced goods stolen from them.

And then there’s the women. I am happy to see well-done movies that don’t have women as the main characters, or that don’t have women in them at all, for that matter. But in Anderson movies, women are lovers, or ex-lovers to be pined for or cursed, or mothers. They are never the main characters and rarely are they agents for real change in his movies. In the past his films have featured female characters with interesting back stories, but in Darjeeling he condensed his previous concessions to his female characters practically down to haiku. By the time they finally catch up to their errant mother, played by Anjelica Huston, she denies them even conversation, insisting that they “speak without using words.” This results in what is basically a staring contest. (I am only being somewhat facetious, here.) Huston is a wonderful actress, even speechless, but it seems slightly criminal to use her in this way.

Thea at Shameless approaches the issue of female characters in Anderson’s films from a different perspective. Here’s a small part of a great article on how Anderson handles people of color:

This is what really breaks my heart: Wes’ track record with women of colour. Anderson just loves pairing women of colour up with dorky white dudes, shortly after dorky white dudes have been dumped or rejected by white ladies. Even though Rushmore’s Margaret Yang is the fullest of all of Wes’ colour characters, she is still paired up with the loveable/hateable Max after Ms Cross turns him down. It’s the same story with Inez, the lovely Latin American hotel cleaner in Bottle Rocket.

Darjeeling, of course, worked for some people. MaryAnn Johansen from FlickFilosopher thinks that all these layers, complications, and quirkiness results in something meaningful:

These movies appear, in their flip quirkiness, to be about people looking for a reason to feel anything at all, but scratch their surfaces just a bit, and it turns out their problem is that they feel too much, that they’re beset by messy, chaotic, confusing emotions that they’re desperate to understand and corral and control. Which is, of course, impossible -- well, the understanding may not be impossible, but the corralling and controlling almost certainly is, and it’s the attempt that results in denying them, pushing them away... in the feeling that there’s no feeling at all.

I think every artist is allowed his or her own perspective. I will keep my eye on him, but for now, I think I am going to back away from the shallow juvenilia that Wes Anderson is handing us. What do you think? I am genuinely curious because I had to search far and wide to find women weighing in on it (my casual searching lead to many reviews by men). I did find Jenny Lauck's snappy take on it on this site.

Liked Darjeeling? Hated it? Don’t care? “What’s for lunch?” Hmm...suddenly curry sounds really good.

Photo Credit: Fox Searchlight

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Your Pop Culture Librarian also has a deconstructionist critic's stick up her bum at I, Asshole almost daily.