Crazy Train
No one makes movies like Wes Anderson. Even if you miss the opening credits of The Darjeeling Limited, you’d immediately know that the same filmmaker who made 1999’s insta-classic Rushmore is behind the camera. Regardless of where Anderson’s movies are set, they all really take place in Wes World, a micromanaged landscape of visual bric-a-brac and indie quirk. Dig those retro ’70s zooms, those symmetrical wide-angle compositions, the vintage-Kinks tunes on the soundtrack. When Anderson’s obsessive aesthetic doesn’t jibe with the performances, or when his scripts are jittery, the result comes off like twee self-parody (see 2004’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou). But when everything falls into place, as it does for much of The Darjeeling Limited, his movies give way to something far deeper than film geekery.The Darjeeling Limited is the train that will take three brothers—jet-setter Jack (Jason Schwartzman), father-to-be Peter (Adrien Brody) and can-do control freak Francis (Owen Wilson)—through the Indian countryside in search of spiritual enlightenment. The siblings have been estranged and emotionally adrift since their father died the previous year, so what better way to re-bond than taking a long trip? Naturally, nothing goes as planned, tempers flare and people get pepper-sprayed. An unexpected tragedy along the way, however, ends up bringing the trio closer together.
As in Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), the emphasis on family ties grounds the movie’s deadpan dialogue and obscure pop-culture references. And even those who don’t care for Anderson’s self-conscious style ought to be moved by the heartfelt way the film deals with grief and brotherly love.
Anyone who’s ever seen live footage of late-’70s/early-’80s Brits Joy Division can testify to the hypnotic power of their late singer, Ian Curtis: Spastically dancing and swaying while intoning gloomy tunes, the lanky frontman was charismatic even when he looked as if he was a million miles away. Anton Corbijn’s Control follows the trajectory of Curtis (played by look-alike Sam Riley) from Bowie-obsessed youth to musical icon to suicide casualty. Corbijn, who shot stills of the band for British weekly NME, treats the singer as part inscrutable Christ figure and part chronically depressed victim. The director’s use of black-and-white film is the perfect way to visualize the group’s stark, moody sound. The film, however, is still beholden to the laws of its genre, which means that the future poster boy for nihilism will at one point say that someday the whole world will know his name. You expect poetry, given Corbijn’s talent. Instead, Control ends up being just another portrait of a self-destructive genius, albeit one as compelling and cryptic as Curtis himself.
Unlike Corbijn’s paean to the Joy Division frontman, Sean Penn’s Into the Wild is never sure whether its protagonist—real-life nature aficionado Christopher McCandless—is an anti-authoritarian hero or just a holy fool. Either way, the actor-director clearly admires McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch) for the lad’s commitment: After cutting up his credit cards, the middle-class kid renamed himself Alexander Supertramp and decided to live off the land sans material comforts. He eventually ended up in the Alaskan wilderness, where he survived for 112 days before perishing. Anyone who’s read Jon Krakauer’s best-selling nonfiction account knows the details, but actually seeing McCandless’s travels is still thrilling. Yet the question keeps nagging at you: Are we supposed to salute this foray into the wild or shake our heads at the sheer idiocy of such extremity?
No one ever said that sustaining a film to the very end was easy, but that doesn’t make the climactic dips of Michael Clayton and Gone Baby Gone any less of a letdown. Both movies start off doing a large number of things right: Clayton is a tightly paced corporate thriller reminiscent of great ’70s paranoia movies like The Parallax View, plus it has George Clooney giving a wonderfully understated performance; Baby’s Beantown mystery benefits from Ben Affleck proving he’s a decent director with a knack for nailing the local Boston color of Dennis Lehane’s book. Then it comes time to wrap things up and splat: Clooney’s got to deliver an Oscar-clip speech, and Affleck puts his younger brother Casey through one clunky dramatic denouement after another. Too bad, because there is a lot to admire in both these stories regarding corruption and personal responsibility. You may, however, want to cut out before their respective last acts.
