The Darjeeling Limited

Dean and I saw The Darjeeling Limited last night. I had just finished a week of on-call, and Dean was about to start a weekend of work, so it was a nice break to go to the movies after dinner.

The scenes in India are gorgeous, stunning, beautiful. Worth the price of admission alone. The train itself is a revelation (think Orient Express, but more basic, more colorful, more quirky, more surreal). The movie is a road-story about three American brothers (played by Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman) who are united on a "spiritual quest" to visit their long-estranged mother (Angelica Houston), who is now a Christian nun in Nepal(?). The plot is actually pretty lame and non-sensical, and the movie doesn't know whether it is honoring Indian spiritual traditions, spiritual quests in general, or just mocking them ironically (or both) for the sake of cheap laughs. Still, the climactic scene, which occurs along a river as three Indian boys are trying to cross with their load of provisions, is riveting and devastating and transforming. This scene, and what immediately follows, is the true heart of the movie, what in the end really mattered, and it is where the writer-director(s) should have focused.