The Darjeeling Limited
Nick Schager
The ingredients that have increasingly defined Wes Anderson's films seem, with The Darjeeling Limited, to have become something like limitations. Anderson's fifth feature is, to be sure, an even looser creation than 2004's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, detailing with relaxed sinuousness the train ride-cum-spiritual journey through India by three estranged brothers (Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, and Adrien Brody). More on-location scenes and fewer background minutiae, however, do not a great departure make, and it's dispiriting to discover a dull familiarity to the director's latest, which once again involves a trio of unhappy, at-odds siblings wracked by mommy and daddy issues, a thematic concern here worked out in such perilously thin ways that it feels less the product of an auteurish fixation than a fear of experimentation. Safe is the best way to describe Darjeeling, though a touch of laziness can also be discerned, especially by the umpteenth slow-mo shot of the men set to a from-the-vault pop song.

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