The Art of Mediocrity: Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited
Mediocris: medius (“middle”) and ocris (“rugged mountain”).
As the film starts, you cannot help but feel you missed something - a car, a taxi to be precise, rushes through the packed street, somewhere in India. The scene evokes an anxiety typical of a fear of being late. But what are we late for? The film seems to lack an introduction, we know nothing about the characters, and as we arrive, the journey is already on its way. This is not uncommon for a film, but as we will learn later, the opening has little to do with the storyline we are to follow - it drops us in the middle of movement, in the midst of the roller-coaster ride.
The Darjeeling Limited is, inherently, a road movie and to our minds, it should obey the secret rules of such. The story revolves around three brothers on a (spiritual) train trip through India, the exact locations are not as important, we’re to find out. But, unlike any traditional road movie about a dysfunctional family - your Little Miss Sunshine’s of the world - the film just starts, there is no set-up of a problem, or a dynamic to be solved. The inciting incident of the film happens off-screen, before the film actually starts - that being the death of the main characters’ father. But the film needs movement to exist - it is about the journey-ing, and not about solving a problem by the end of the third act.
Wes Anderson characters are usually constituted of an inhuman humanity, imperfect like children's book's illustrations, but not in this film. The three main characters, the Whitman brothers, seem oddly human, even if sometimes plagued by a second-handed whimsy of Anderson’s. In search of a word to describe them, only one comes to mind - mediocrity. They are mediocre people. And, this characterization of the center of film, transforms The Darjeeling Limited into the ultimate subversion of a “road movie”: instead of being forced to take the reins of the journey and learn from it, the film is marked by an inherent passivity, a void of action and feeling at its core. Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman) are not entirely sure why they agreed to go on the trip their older brother Francis (Owen Wilson) planned, but they went as if they had no choice. The characters' interaction with the environment is nothing more than touristy, there is no personal exchange - they treat India as bottled escapism they can consume like painkillers to avoid their own individual problems (complicated love affairs, a spouse’s pregnancy, depression) and the loss of their father. The characters feel like they are being taken on the ride rather than choosing their way. Even in the second half of the film, when the structure of the story seems to be broken down - something that many critics expressed as a meandering of plot or worse, loss of purpose - one thing remains constant, their absolute denial of choosing a direction. The characters are lost in place as they are lost in mind.
The rejection of control in their journey is also reflected on the characters’ relationship to time - there is an avoidance of the future, a nostalgia incorporated in the maintenance of material things of the past (the dad’s luggage, glasses, car, even music*). Which is reinforced in the new things acquired by the brothers, which almost all fit in the category of objects of violence, self-protection, and denomination of territory they could pose against the others and that will unknowingly hurt themselves in return (the pepper spray, the snake, the belt). Also, we can discuss how each of the brothers has a very particular connection with time, to the point of it becoming symbolic - Jack is debating whether to end a relationship, which ties him so strongly to the past, Peter is to become a father for the first time, tying him to the present (the baby being about to be born), and Francis has just survived a suicide attempt, which ties him to a new opportunity of future. Their relationship with time can also be pointed out in their failed communication: in their first scene of true dialogue, in the restaurant car, each of them has a different rhythm and they cannot for the life of them understand one another. Or, one may argue, do they want to; they are too focused on their own experience and disconnected from one another.
The film, however, as many critics have pointed out, leads to nowhere. There is little considerable change besides their dynamic and understanding of each other, big obvious metaphors (the getting rid of the baggage) and the film ends. It ends in a quasi-perfect recreation of its beginning, implying a cyclicality. Like Sisyphus, the characters are stuck in an eternal mediocrity: there is no getting out of the “middle of the mountain”, there is no reaching the top. There is only trying. The film zig zags across space and registers a human incapacity to grow considerably. And, it is in this displacement that the film brings its better meditation on grief and (some aspect of) self-reflection. There is no getting over grief, there is only existing alongside it - even if it is not materialized in the monogrammed Louis Vuitton luggage. And, as the final shot shows us, we can only keep moving in the hopes to get somewhere.