Estranged brothers Francis, Peter and Jack reunite for a train trip across India. The siblings have not spoken in over a year, ever since their father passed away. Faced with different challenges in life. The brothers fall into old patterns of behavior as Francis reveals the real reason for the reunion: to visit their mother in a Himalayan convent.
Apart from having thus created the first road-picture homework assignment, Anderson isn't breaking new ground here. But he and his actors appear to be having a larkish good time.
The film as a whole operates in Mr. Anderson's patented, semi-precious zone of antic and droll. It's not as if the filmmaker has gone off the rails. He's just not solidly on them.
The screenplay does have ambitions to say something about brotherhood and spirituality, but Anderson's sense of style is so strong that sincerity and emotion struggle to be heard.
There's never a moment when you're not conscious of the movie's artifice -- its set design is part of its entertainment -- but the experience isn't exactly off-putting, either.
Toledo Blade
March 12, 2014
It's very much what I think Anderson intended - a light travelogue of small consequence, with a slight, though sincere and concerned effort to bring a heart back into his films.
For all Anderson's pleasing, refreshing auteur tendencies, the overwhelming feeling delivered by 'The Darjeeling Limited' is of frustration, déjà vu and little progression.
Anderson's gentle parody of westerners who lob into an ancient culture expecting to pick up enlightenment and peace as easily as a shoe shine or over-the-counter painkillers is very funny.
Wes Anderson transports his arch, pristine, melancholic sensibility to India, where three estranged brothers meet after their father's death and hop a train in a quixotic attempt to heal their spiritual wounds.
