The Screengrab : anjelica huston

Precursors: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Nick Schager — Mon, 11 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Rian Johnson’s The Brothers Bloom arrives in select theaters this weekend before opening wide later in the month, and it so egregiously apes Wes Anderson's trademark aesthetic that one would be better off simply revisiting the film in which the director’s style fully crystallized, The Royal Tenenbaums. Anderson’s J.D. Salinger-esque saga concerns the efforts of the titular clan’s estranged patriarch, Royal (Gene Hackman), to reconcile with his wife (Anjelica Huston) and three child-prodigy-turned-adult-misfit children (Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson) by telling them he’s terminally ill. He’s not, but his ruse gets him back in the door, thus instigating a reunion that's both funny and poignant, thanks in part to a cast (which also includes Danny Glover, co-writer Owen Wilson, and Bill Murray) whose performances are uniformly droll and sorrowful, but primarily due to Anderson’s expert stewardship. Through his beautifully symmetrical compositions, use of slow-motion and pop songs, and intricately detailed set design, Anderson creates a winningly idiosyncratic, hermetically sealed world in which to situate his audience. Just as impressive, however, is his ability to make his aggressively quirky characters not only agents of humor but also pathos, the film – unlike Anderson’s more uneven subsequent efforts – offering up a near-ideal balance of silliness and sentimentality.

Bloody Valentines: The Worst Relationships In Cinema History (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

OLIVER & BARBARA ROSE, THE WAR OF THE ROSES (1989)

Danny DeVito’s black-heart Valentine may not be a great movie, but it’s still a pretty good one, a neat little primer of stereotypes (and uncomfortable truths) of sexual politics in the late 20th century (as well as an emetic corrective to the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan oeuvre of junk food Hollywood romance. In the midst of a contentious turf battle with his soon to be ex-wife, DeVito’s character warns his client, Oliver, that when it comes to divorce, “There is no winning! Only degrees of losing!” Naturally, Oliver doesn’t listen: not only is he arrogant and stubborn, but he’s also played by Michael Douglas, and so our sympathies at first are with his long-suffering spouse, Barbara (Kathleen Turner)...that is, until we realize Barbara is just as hateful in her cold, ruthless femininity as Oliver is in his chauvinist manhood. And so the couple’s mutual hostility escalates into an archetypal battle of the sexes where both sides are right and both sides are wrong: Barbara can’t stand her corporate asshole of a husband, yet feels entitled to the lavish house she transformed into a home with his corporate asshole money, prompting Oliver’s angry reminder, “It’s a lot easier to spend it than it is to make it, honeybun!” On the flip side of the gender equation, Oliver treats his wife like shit, yet naively expects her to keep providing love and validation (or, in Barbara’s words, “You expect me to keep reassuring you sexually even now when we disgust each other?”), leading to a grim moment of Pyrrhic victory in the movie’s final minutes that speaks volumes about the real balance of power in most American marriages.

BILL & ABBY & THE FARMER, DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)

It’s a story as old as the Bible. Lovers on the run pretend to be siblings while in a land strange to them. She is beautiful, and the local patriarch is interested in her. She marries the guy -- what choice does she have? -- and here’s where the stories diverge. In one, her god is displeased and smites the land with a plague. In another, her god reveals the truth to her false husband in a dream, and he makes amends with extravagant gifts, even though he was the one deceived. In the last, her false husband catches her cavorting with her lover, and figures it all out. All three come to pass in Days of Heaven. Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams) are on the run after he’s killed his boss in a fight. They arrive in the extraordinarily lush and beautiful Texas fields (so lush, in fact, that they’re actually in Canada, not Texas) of The Farmer (Sam Shepard), where they pretend to be siblings so that no one will connect them with the murder back in Chicago. They put in a season’s worth of work, and the Farmer, smitten with Abby, asks her to stay. Bill encourages her to marry him because the Farmer is ill, and Bill can see salad days before them. She does indeed marry the Farmer, but not long after, the Farmer figures out the score between them. He gives Bill money to leave. While Bill’s gone, those plan falls apart: not only does the Farmer thrive, but Abby begins to love him. Abby is surprisingly passive throughout the movie. Maybe not too surprising, given that the story takes place in 1916, when Victorian morality still ran rampant through this country. But all she does is love. First Bill, then the Farmer. And from her innocent love will come only plague and death. After all, this isn't the Bible; it's Texas.

THE MONSTER & THE MONSTER’S MATE, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)

It’s said by some that the closest, most loving couples act like they were made for each other. James Whale’s early horror classic proves how awful that can be in practice – at least when it’s taken literally. Of course, it’s a pretty fine distinction whether or not a married couple is better off when only one partner is made out of the stitched-together and reanimated hunks of deceased criminals or just one of them is; on the one hand, it’s good for a long-term couple to share the same interests, but on the other hand, there is such a thing as spending too much time together. In the sequel to Frankenstein, the creature makes a shocking return, and doesn’t have to bend Dr. Frankenstein and the overeager Dr. Pretorius’ arms too hard to get them to head into the lab and create for him a mate, in the form of the breathtaking Elsa Lanchester. Unfortunately, the Bride doesn’t quite react as well to her post-corpse existence as does the Modern Prometheus, and she’s even less pleased at the matchmaking that’s taken place without her consent. Her eerie, spastic behavior makes it clear to the Monster that wedded bliss is a remote possibility, and since there’s no divorce court for inhuman monsters (at least ones not rich enough to hire Raoul Felder), he decides to return to the sweet embrace of death, muttering a line that anticipates Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: “We belong dead.”

CHARLIE PARTANNA & IRENE WALKER, PRIZZI’S HONOR (1985)

“Do I ice her? Do I marry her? Which of these things?” Jack Nicholson’s mafia hitman, Charlie Partanna, asks a question most potential bridegrooms never get around to asking themselves in this underrated John Huston black comedy about the dangers of mixing business with pleasure. In Prizzi’s Honor, Nicholson plays a high-ranking mob killer who meets the lovely Irene Walker (played by Kathleen Turner, who, as one of the modern era’s great femmes fatale, has played the distaff side of many great bloody screen couples), and, upon pursuing her, discovers that they share an uncommon occupation. Naturally it’s good to have things in common, as the calculating Maerose Prizzi (played to perfection by Anjelica Huston) points out while encouraging Charlie to wed Irene, but the perils of a couple working together are well-known to relationship counselors, and it’s particularly exacerbated when the work they do involves murdering people for profit. It’s no surprise that the movie sets up an eventual, and fatal, confrontation between the two killers, but how it arrives at that inexorable conclusion is a surprise and a delight for most of its running time, especially as Nicholson’s sometimes-befuddled traditionalist and Turner’s gregarious maverick play off one another.

BART TARE & ANNIE LAURIE STARR, GUN CRAZY (1950)

It’s a cliché that a gun is a phallic stand-in for some people, but few movies make that association more explicit – especially given the cinematic restrictions of the time – than Joseph H. Lewis’ terrific overheated noir thriller Gun Crazy. Tightly-wound, desperately alone John Dall as Bart Tare has only ever loved one thing: shooting. That all changes when he runs into trick shooter Annie Laurie Starr (a gorgeously ruined Peggy Cummins) at a touring carnival; after a notoriously sexy scene that sublimates carnal desire into gun-love in ways that Wayne LaPierre could only dream of, they’re hooked into each other for life. But while Bart only wants the love of the only woman who could ever outgun him, Annie, one of noir’s slickest femmes fatale, wants the good life, and she isn’t going to let anything, not even Bart’s reluctance to commit crimes, stand in her way. She’s been beaten down bad by life, and the way she figures it, it’s about time for life to get a taste of its own medicine. All noir films are saturated with a sense of doom, but Gun Crazy’s is downright oppressive, as Bart reluctantly embarks on a life of crime knowing he’s helpless in the face of his love for Annie. But while his course is set, his eyes are wide open, and there’s a terrifically revelatory scene after their last big caper ends up bloodier than anticipated: “Two people dead,” he spits at her, “just so we can live without working!” It’s too late, though, always too late, and in the end, Bart and Laurie, who go together like guns and ammunition, end up the only way they could, like cold spent shells on the ground.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce

LazyVision: Week Ending Feb. 14th

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:30:00 GMT

We know that fans of the Screengrab want the dish on what's happening now in Hollywood (hence the Weekend Box Office Report) and what's yet to come (hence the Morning Deal Report). We know you want to be aware of what's coming to home video, hence DVD Digest. And we know that sometimes, you just want to park yourselves in front of the tube to catch a good flick, hence Set Your DVRs!.

We also know that some of you are deeply, deeply lazy individuals. And, beyond that, you're cheap, and you can't figure out anything more technologically complicated than a light switch. (We say this in the most loving way possible, for we count ourselves in your number.) You want to be able to turn on the TV -- not the computer -- and watch a good movie, anytime you want, without having to program anything -- for free. After all, wasn't that the promise of the new modern era? Wasn't that the allure of the digital age -- any movie you want, any time you want, no waiting, no fees?

Well, assuming you have digital cable, Video On Demand was made for lazy gasbags like you. Most of the stuff shown on VOD is either pay-per-view or, to put it mildly, dire, but occasionally, a gem will pop up on the "Free Movies" feature as a reward for infinitely patient cheapskates like yours truly. So, once a week, we'll bring you a handful of not-completely terrible movies you can watch whenever you want, for zero dollars and change. (Check your local provider for channel details.)

- FEARnet this week is featuring Night of the Creeps as one of its free movies on demand. This underrated 1986 camp-horror classic from cult director Fred Dekker is a real winner -- it never takes its zombies-from-out-space-plot too seriously, and plays around with the conventions of the genre years before the Scream franchise got the idea. The characters are all named after cult directors (Raimi, Carpenter, Cronenberg, etc.), and best of all, it's held together by a swell performance from beloved tough-guy character actor Tom Atkins.

- The Sundance Channel's on-demand service is offering a look at John Huston's The Dead, gratis. The final film Huston ever made, it's also one of his finest and most personal; adapted from a very fine James Joyce short story, it features some astonishing performances (including by his daughter, Anjelica) in a story involving a woman's memories of her long-dead first love, and how it stirs emotions in her husband during an Epiphany gathering. Best of all, The Dead isn't currently available in a U.S. DVD release, so this opportunity is even more special.

- Turner Classic Movies also has an on-demand service, and free this week is the classic 1948 noir flick Naked City. Somewhere between solid post-war noir, hardboiled police procedural, and ripe pre-war crime drama, Naked City is a tightly wound look at every step of a brutal murder investigation in New York. Directed by legendary noir specialist Jules Dassin, Naked City features a terrific villain in Ted DeCorsia, a gritty semi-documentary filming style, and an absolutely gripping extended chase scene through the city. It was later made into a popular TV crime show in the 1950s .

- FEARnet's on-demand service coughs up another great free offering this week in Escape from New York. Made during the period when a new John Carpenter movie was cause for excitment, this cult classic takes place in a near-future dystopia where New York City is a maximum-security prison. When President Donald Pleasance's plane crashes there with the nuclear football on board, it's up to Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, one of the all-time great screen bad-asses, to bail him out. Russell gamely waltzes with a swell cast that includes Adrienne Barbeau, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton -- and good ol' Tom Atkins.

- Finally, TNT's on-demand service this week offers the chance to see John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood. The 1991 film set off a wave of west coast gangsta dramas, but Boyz was the first and is still one of the best, as Singleton (whose filmmaking skills are raw and exciting here) takes a look at a group of childhood friends who struggle in different ways against the rough life of gang-ridden south central Los Angeles. Larry Fishburne's performance is a standout, and this was one of the first movies in which evidence was presented that Ice Cube was a good actor -- evidence which has been sorely lacking in recent years.

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Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Dead

Set Your DVR!: February 6 - 8, 2009

Phil Nugent — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The Dead, playing on the Sundance Channel on Saturday, February 7 at 9 PM central/10 PM eastern, with a repeat at 2 AM central/3 AM eastern. This was the last movie directed by John Huston--a Christmas story, it was released in December of 1987, less than two months after his death--and he went out in glory. It represented a stretch for Huston, reaching confidently into areas that he'd never explored in his previous films, and it's also different from other movies based on the works of James Joyce, which tend to moisten and fall apart from the directors' accumulated flop sweat as they realize they have no idea how to get the material to play. Huston gave the story a deceptively simple staging, assembling a fine cast of actors--Donal McCann as the hero Gabriel, Donal Donnelly, Dan O'Herlihy, Marie Kean, Cathleen Delany, Helena Carroll, and Anjelica Huston as Gabriel's wife--and using them to demonstrate what the right voices can do for Joyce's dialogue. (The members of this ensemble are uncanny at acting as if they'd been getting together for these ritual holiday dinners for so many years that they all know each other's weak spots and points of pride.) Then, at the very end, after Anjelica Huston's big monologue, he just steps back and closes on Donal McCann reciting the closing passages of the story, as if he were handing it back to its creator. Inexplicably, this movie is not currently available on DVD, so its reappearance on Sundance after a prolonged drop off the cable radar screen counts as a rare and wondrous thing.

Incidentally, Sundance's weekend schedule also includes multiple showings of Jeff Nichols's white trash tragedy Shotgun Stories, starting on Sunday, February 8 at 5:15 AM central/6:15 AM eastern and with a couple of repeats throughout the day. This information is provided as a public service in light of all the complaints we've been getting from people who haven't been able to find the movie on DVD. It's available on DVD, but there's been a terrific run on the damn things since Paul Clark bestowed upon it the honor of reviewing it by request.

Turner Classic Movies spends February sunk in its annual "31 Days of Oscar" programming, with the schedule decorated wall-to-wall with films that were nominated for Academy Awards. This is not traditionally TCM's most exciting time of the year, but they do generally pull out some oddball titles that have since lapsed into total obscurity, or at least general unavailability. Late tonight, at 2:30 AM central/ 3:30 AM eastern, the channel is showing 1952's The Atomic City, a B-movie thriller with an atomic-age plot gimmick--the villains are Commie spies who kidnap the son of a Los Alamos nuclear scientist in an attempt to get their hands on the formula for the A-bomb--that was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. (It was written by Sidney Boehm, whose other credits include The Big Heat.) Then, on Sunday, 7 PM central/ 8 PM eastern, TCM premieres Elia Kazan's directorial debut, the 1945 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, based on Betty Smith's popular novel about family life in the Brooklyn tenements at the start of the the twentieth century. (James Dunn, who plays the ineffectual, drink-damaged patriarch, won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.) There's another TCM premiere later that night, 1 AM central/ 2 AM eastern: John Singleton's 1991 Boyz N the Hood. Unique among these movies, it's currently available on DVD, but how many chances are you going to have in this life to see Robert Osborne introduce an Ice Cube movie?

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "The Dead"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Okay, that's enough of the goofball so-bad-it's-good stuff. We all enjoyed taking a gander at bizarre foreign intrusions, both Mexican and Wookie, into the Christmas traditions in the form of Santa Claus and The Star Wars Holiday Special, but by the time I was done with those two, I needed a nice healthy dose of holiday melancholy to remind me that the festival season can be one of ineffable sadness as well as inexpressable joy. And nobody does ineffable sadness and inexpressable joy like the Irish, so I decided to get things back on the straight and narrow with John Huston's final film as a director, The Dead. Though it's not often thought of as a traditional holiday film, its action takes place on Epiphany, which in the Catholic calendar is the last of the Twelve Days of Christmas. And, considering how important the role of epiphany was in his writing, it's no surprise that this is based on a short story (from Dubliners) by the mighty James Joyce, who, like Huston, was an Irishman through and through despite his sometimes standoffish relationship with his homeland and its culture.

The Feast of Epiphany, like Christmas, is a time for family gatherings, for coming together and for realizing how important your friends and relations are in your life. Joyce needed little reminding of the subject; he lived most of his life in the long shadow of his family, for good and for ill. Likewise, John Huston -- literally deathly ill when he made The Dead, the third movie of his highly improbable but hugely successful late-stage comeback -- knew how important family was in his life. His own career as a successful actor and director had been predicted and preplanned by his father, Walter, and The Dead featured a fantastic screenplay by his own son Tony and a tremendous performance in the lead role by his daughter-in-law Anjelica. Like the characters in the story, Huston was surrounding himself, likely for the last time, with the people who loved him, and in the shadow of the people who made him, for one last realization, one last epiphany. The result is one of the smallest and quietest, but also one of the greatest, films of his career.

The action of The Dead, such as it is, revolves around a celebration of the Feast of Epihany in the company of Professor Gabriel Conroy (movingly played by Donal McCann, heading an almost all-Irish cast) and his wife Gretta (a stellar job by Anjelica Huston). The course of the evening's conversations -- and that's all there is to The Dead, conversation and memory and observation and realization -- will reveal a young love of Gretta's which has, through the course of her marriage and her entire life, lingered like an unquiet ghost between her and her husband. As they pass the hours at the home of Gabriel's aunts Julia and Kate, played with lovely grace and competence by Cathleen Delany and Helena Carroll, the professor will realize, in a stunning display of what the philosopher Richard Rorty calls the solidarity of irony, that he is capable of feeling intense affection and regret for someone he has never met, a long-dead rival for his wife's affections: and that because of that, he is capable of loving his wife all the more.

Joyce's work carries an emotional power that is often entirely internal -- its great revelations and transformations take place not in the world we can see, but in the much vaster world that exists inside our heads. The Dead is no exception, and presented John Huston with the challenge of showing us in a visual medium what is actually happening where no eyes can see; but he succeeds admirably by use of a deeply sensitive script and a more than capable cast. The Dead is filled with melancholy and even sadness, but in the purest spirit of the holidays, it's a sadness that binds, that brings together, that makes more human. In the rhythms of the Epiphany feast, in the stories told a thousand times, in the familiar songs sung, the predictable jokes laughed at, and the great sorrows of the past recalled, John Huston -- living out the very story he was filming -- reminded us of why shared unhappiness is just as vital as shared happiness: because it is shared. It is the snow that falls on the living and the dead alike.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: A hearty Irish 11 pipers piping. If The Dead isn't a perfect holiday film, it's an intensely felt and enormously moving one, and one of the few that both fits into the mood and spirit of Christmas and is removed enough from it to be a film worth seeing at any time of year.

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas

Screengrab Review: Choke

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:00:00 GMT

While attending Austin's South-By-Southwest Film Festival in March of this year, I caught a screening of the big-studio adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Choke, which I’m told is daring and provocative and, apparently, beloved by hipsters. The theater was filled with big studio Men in Black armed with night vision goggles and whatnot to prevent any pirating of their upcoming release...odd, considering the much more likeable and successful Knocked Up got screened at the 2007 festival without nearly so much off-putting, paranoid nonsense.

Anyway, Choke tells the story of sex addict Sam Rockwell and his sex addict friends (including Joel Grey?!!?!?) and their struggles with sex addiction, which is apparently a terrible problem in Los Angeles and, uh, probably other places (like the story's New Jersey setting, Palahniuk's Washington State stomping grounds and wherever David Duchovny happens to be at any given moment)...although, to be fair, I’m guessing the condition is more of a problem for sex addicts who don’t get to screw around with gorgeous starlets like Kelly Macdonald and Bijou Phillips.

Rockwell’s character also likes to pretend he’s choking in restaurants, because the attention it brings him makes up for the love he was denied by his wacky, now Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother (played by recent bad-mom specialist Anjelica Huston).

Ho-hum. Not a bad movie exactly: there’s some funny bits involving a colonial theme park, a sit-up-and-take notice performance by Gillian Jacobs as a stripper named Cherry Daquiri (not her real name) and, of course, plenty of sex and nudity...but it all just winds up playing like the pilot for some new Showtime series I'm never gonna watch. Sam Rockwell is once again likeable yet not quite likeable (or relatable) enough to really care about, and I left the theater wondering how many better (or at least more interesting) movies, say, the Baghead mumblecore crowd, the documentarians behind Man On Wire or Young@Heart or any number of unheralded SXSW and other below-the-radar indie filmmakers could have made with the millions they spent making (and marketing the shit out of) this utterly disposable "edgy" studio offering.

Related Stories - Trailer Review: Choke, Sundance: The Final Roundup, Greta Gerwig and the SXSW Invasion

Trailer Review: Choke

Paul Clark — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Sam Rockwell has been working steadily in movies for almost twenty years now in both comedy and drama, but in since the beginning of the decade he’s really come into his own. But while character work as diverse as Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Assassination of Jesse James, and Joshua (my favorite performance of 2007, case you’re wondering), has made him one of the most fascinating actors currently working, he still hasn’t managed to find a true star-making role. If its trailer is any indication, Choke could change that. Based on a novel by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, Choke’s Victor Mancini is a perfect fit with the smart-assed, sleepy-eyed underachiever types that Rockwell as always excelled at playing. But what distinguishes this film is that Victor is the protagonist, as we follow his misadventures as a con man and sex addict trying to care for his terminally-ill mother and finding a way to be not completely irredeemable as a person. But while director Clark Gregg’s style appears to be a far cry from David Fincher’s attention-grabbing Fight Club visuals, he’s at least had the good sense to surround Rockwell with a worthy cast of costars, especially Anjelica Huston as his mother and Kelly MacDonald (*drool*) as the tentative object of his affection. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this one.

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Darjeeling Limited (2007, Wes Anderson)

Paul Clark — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Wes Anderson is something of a polarizing figure among cinephiles. For every one who believes he’s a gifted filmmaker with an irresistible comic sensibility, there’s another who finds his work too self-satisfied. There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground, and Anderson seems to be fine with this, as his style has become quirkier and more eccentric with each film he makes. For years I’ve been in the pro-Anderson camp, and I’ve often found myself defending movies like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou against those who found them insufferable. But when I first saw The Darjeeling Limited, I had to admit that the naysayers had a point.

Still, at the time I was reluctant to write off Darjeeling as a failed effort on Anderson’s part. Yes, I didn’t respond very well to it, I wondered if my reaction was based on my disappointment at the film being somewhat less than totally awesome. I decided to give the film a little distance and revisit it after it was released on DVD, so that I might be able to approach it with some perspective. And so I watched it again this past weekend, and this second viewing mostly confirmed my initial misgivings. The Darjeeling Limited isn’t a total botch, but it’s definitely the least of Anderson’s films, and the one in which the limitations of his style really come through most clearly.

One of the most common objections that’s raised to Anderson’s work has to do with his visual style, in which he situates his characters in storybook-style tableaux. In Anderson’s films, there’s always some curious knick knack or peripheral detail at the corner of the frame. But while in previous films, all of these sly little jokes added up to create convincing and original environments for the characters- remember the underwear painting in Eli Cash’s house?- here they just become oppressive. Anderson and production designer Mark Friedberg let their imaginations run wild in creating a colorful version of India, but the small bits of design business don’t really add up to anything, so instead of creating a delightful world for the film, the style instead becomes oppressive, like it’s been art-directed to death.

Of course, some of this problem might have been alleviated had the world created by Anderson been populated by vivid characters, but sadly, it’s not. Darjeeling focuses on the travels of the Whitman brothers- played by Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman- as they venture across India in an attempt to reconnect with each other and have a shared spiritual experience. However, none of the characters is drawn with very much depth, with each being defined primarily by his quirks. Faring worst is Schwartzman as little brother Jack. Jack is meant to be a sensitive writer who is still reeling from the disillusion of a longstanding relationship (part of which we see in the film’s companion piece Hotel Chevalier), but I never felt a thing for the guy. Part of the problem is Schwartzman’s performance- perfect as he was for Rushmore, he’s not a very expressive actor, certainly not soulful enough to pull off a character who should by rights be an emotional linchpin for the film.

All of Anderson’s recent films are in some way or other about family, whether the bond is one of blood or, more commonly, a surrogate family arrangement. The Darjeeling Limited is no exception, but what it lacks is a character who stands outside the family unit, grounding the more whimsical and dysfunctional aspects of the family unit. Frankly, Darjeeling needs a character like this, because without it the story becomes a parade of quirkiness. Even Adrien Brody’s Peter, who appears most likely to become the pragmatist of the group, ends up getting caught on the wavelength of the other characters.

But perhaps most annoying is how on-the-nose certain elements of the film are. Anderson has always had a tendency to use symbolism in his work- like the shark that represents death in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou- but never have the symbols clanged so loudly as they do in The Darjeeling Limited. For example, as if Owen Wilson’s bandaged head doesn’t make it clear enough that he’s been psychologically scarred, Anderson includes a scene in which Wilson removes his bandages in front of his brothers, looks at his scars, and says, “I guess I’ve still got some healing to do.” The train itself is pretty clearly meant to symbolize life, which Anderson makes explicit in an admittedly pretty neat scene in which various supporting characters are shown living their own lives in individual train cars. But the most egregious use of symbolism gone haywire is the use of the Whitmans’ dead father’s custom-made monogrammed baggage, which they carry along with them. The film’s climactic scene finds the boys chasing down a departing train and finally having to leave behind their baggage in order to catch it. Needless to say, the thundering obviousness of the scene is sort of insulting.

All of this is not to say that The Darjeeling Limited is without any merit whatsoever. Anderson is too talented a director to make a worthless, uninteresting film, and Darjeeling contains its share of delights. For one thing, its opening scene is brilliant, so much so that the rest of the film is all the more disappointing in comparison. In addition, the film has another of Anderson’s characteristically wonderful soundtracks, this one packed full of music from films directed by James Ivory and Satyajit Ray. However, these delights are modest compared to the film’s many faults. Hell, I haven’t even gotten around to mentioning the parallel scenes in which Wilson is taken to task for ordering dinner for his brothers, and the one where the boys’ long-lost mother (Anjelica Huston) does exactly the same thing. Hardly subtle, and sadly, all too typical of Anderson’s approach here.

Most filmmakers have a comfort zone as far as style and material are concerned, and many of the films I’ve written about so far in this series have failed because their directors have stepped too far out of this comfort zone. But The Darjeeling Limited is exactly the opposite- everything about the film resides so squarely in Anderson’s wheelhouse that it practically feels like an inside joke. I still believe Anderson is a gifted filmmaker, but if he wants to grow as an artist he needs to find new wrinkles for his style, because if The Darjeeling Limited is any indication, diminishing returns have begun to set in, which if you’re an artist is the last thing you want to happen.