The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
Wes Anderson's seventh feature, The Darjeeling Limited, arrived in 2007 off the back of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a film that had divided audiences and critics alike, and it carried with it a sense of the director needing to reassert himself without quite reinventing the wheel. The film was shot almost entirely on location in Rajasthan, which was a deliberate and fairly bold production decision: rather than constructing Anderson's usual controlled, studio-friendly environment, the crew worked on actual Indian Railways trains and at real stations, lending the film a texture of genuine place that sits in interesting tension with the director's characteristic artificiality. The script was written collaboratively by Anderson, Roman Coppola, and Jason Schwartzman, with the three of them developing the story partly from personal experience of travelling in India together. That biographical seed is worth keeping in mind: the brotherly friction and the compulsive over-organisation on screen have at least some roots in real creative relationships.
Fox Searchlight Pictures backed the production through Anderson's own American Empirical Pictures banner alongside Collage, and the budget was modest by studio standards, which suited the stripped-back, train-bound premise. Anderson had established his visual grammar rigorously by this point, from The Royal Tenenbaums onwards, and The Darjeeling Limited works squarely within it. Cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman, Anderson's regular collaborator since Bottle Rocket, frames Rajasthan in warm, saturated ochres and dusty pinks, the kind of palette that makes even a cramped train corridor feel like a painted illustration. His wide, flat compositions treat the Indian landscape as both a backdrop and a character in its own right, though one kept at a certain aesthetic remove. Editor Andrew Weisblum, who would later win an Academy Award for his work on Black Swan, keeps the rhythm brisk without sacrificing Anderson's characteristic stillness: cuts land with the precision of a full stop rather than an exclamation mark. The soundtrack, in lieu of a composed score, leans heavily on music by Indian film composers from the 1960s and 70s, particularly Satyajit Ray's work, which gives the film a flavour that feels borrowed but affectionately so.
The three leads carry a great deal of the film's weight. Owen Wilson, playing the eldest brother Francis, was at a complicated point in his personal life around the time of filming, and there is something in his performance, a kind of brittle authority wrapped around visible hurt, that feels less performed than usual. Adrien Brody, fresh from the intense discipline of The Pianist, brings a quieter, more interior quality to the middle brother Peter, a nice counterweight to the more voluble siblings. Jason Schwartzman, co-writer and regular Anderson collaborator, plays the youngest, Jack, with a studied nonchalance that fits the world Anderson builds as though tailored for it. Amara Karan and Wallace Wolodarsky round out the principal cast in supporting roles, providing warmth and occasional comic grounding to what could otherwise be a very hermetically sealed trio.
For those already familiar with Anderson's filmography, The Darjeeling Limited sits in recognisable company alongside The Grand Budapest Hotel and Fantastic Mr. Fox as a polished but unremarkable entry in a body of work that holds itself to consistently high standards. It runs a tight 91 minutes and is preceded by a short film, Hotel Chevalier, which provides context for Schwartzman's character and is worth seeking out before watching.
I have watched and written about a lot of Wes Anderson by now, enough to call him one of my favourite directors, though I would stop short of calling him one of the best, and I think that distinction matters. The two are not the same thing.
What Anderson offers is reliability of a particular, comforting kind: his films are consistently good to very good, built from the same immaculate dolls'-house symmetry and deadpan melancholy, and you always know more or less what you are going to get. The Darjeeling Limited is a near-perfect example of exactly that, good to very good, and not a great deal more.
It sends three estranged American brothers on a train across India in the wake of their father's death, ostensibly on a spiritual pilgrimage, really on a bickering, baggage-laden attempt to become a family again. It is all present and correct: the storybook framing, the needle-drop soundtrack that is, as ever, a highlight, the wounded, over-articulate men-children talking their way around their grief. The snag is how familiar it all feels.
This is well-trodden Anderson turf, the dysfunctional-family-in-matching-outfits territory he mapped out in The Royal Tenenbaums, and Darjeeling never quite steps out of that film's shadow, offering a slightly by-the-numbers version of a story he had already told better.
The cast, though, is a joy. A small confession: I generally cannot stand Owen Wilson, I have called him a fair bit worse than that in reviews past, and yet, as the domineering eldest brother forever laminating everyone's itinerary, he actually won me over here, which almost never happens. Adrien Brody is quietly excellent as the middle brother, and Jason Schwartzman, for whom I have nursed a soft spot ever since his turn in Spun, slots into Anderson's world as though he were born in it. The three of them bicker and wound and slowly reconcile with a lived-in, brotherly chemistry that is comfortably the best thing the film has going for it.
So it lands where most of Anderson's work lands for me: thoroughly enjoyable, beautifully made, and just shy of essential. If you have never warmed to his particular brand of whimsy this will not be the one to convert you, and if you have, you may find it sits a touch too close to films of his you love more. But a minor Wes Anderson is still a lovely way to pass a couple of hours, and the brothers alone are worth the fare. Three and a half stars, and a good-to-very-good entry from a director who rarely misses, even when he is repeating himself.
The Darjeeling Limited is the kind of film that prompts a specific kind of conversation: not whether it is good (it is), but where it sits in the order of things. As a portrait of fraternal dysfunction played out across a sun-bleached, beautifully composed Indian landscape, it has considerable charm and some genuinely affecting moments. It will not rearrange anyone's thinking about what cinema can do, and it probably is not the Anderson film you reach for first when someone asks you to convince them. But it is a generous, warm and carefully made piece of work, and sometimes that is precisely enough. The train, after all, does not have to be going anywhere extraordinary to make the journey worth taking.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2007 | Watched: 2026-08-23
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Darjeeling Limited (2007) on YouTube
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