The Darjeeling Limited

Nothing epitomizes The Darjeeling Limited and its creator, Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore), quite like the oft-cited Gertrude Stein quip about Oakland, California: “there is no there there.” Most frustrating, perhaps, is that many Andersonites would probably embrace that critique: isn’t the writer-director presenting us with men lost in their own “lostness,” contemporary Quixotes staggering tragicomically through India in search of a spirituality elusive to them and to us all? That’s not just threadbare philosophy; it’s threadbare charlatanism. Indeed, for all its visual acumen, The Darjeeling Limited is intellectually lazy filmmaking, pure and simple. True, Anderson has ambitions. His footnotes and endnotes encompass, well, most of The Criterion Collection, yet the result is a black hole; instead of trading plot points for a strong thematic trajectory—that fastidious interweaving of style, form and content characteristic of the best of modernist and Hollywood renaissance cinema—Anderson merely trusts that profundity will emerge from his impeccable taste or from his own and his leads’ (Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody and Jason Schwartzman) raging Peter Pan syndromes. Summoning good art—everything from Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus to Buster Keaton to The Rolling Stones’ “Play with Fire”—is not the same as making it. It’s more like taking the corpse of your best friend to a taxidermist. SKIP IT

The Darjeeling Limited is now playing at the Cumberland (159 Cumberland St.).