Search for a film:

November 14, 2007

Lifestyles of the Rich & Neurotic

Wes Anderson's Obsession With Money

By Raph

In a slow-motion scene heavy with meaning toward the end of Wes Anderson’s newest family tragicomedy, The Darjeeling Limited, three well-to-do brothers run to catch a train and finally let go, literally, of the expensive matching suitcases they’ve been lugging— or, rather, having other people lug for them— all over India. The brothers, Francis (Owen Wilson), Jack (Jason Schwartzman) and Peter (Adrien Brody) are familiar Anderson protagonists: smart, deadpan, a little socially inept, prone to extremes of both cruelty and tenderness; and, last but certainly not least, very, very wealthy.

Anderson’s second film Rushmore, which came out in 1998 and stars Schwartzman in his first film role, is one of my all-time favorite movies. I was ready to drink Anderson’s Kool-Aid before there was even a Kool-Aid to drink, and naturally I was excited at the prospect of his next film, The Royal Tenenbaums, whose colorful promotional poster promised a bursting at the seams all-star cast and plenty of quirk. Tenenbaums retained some of the flavor I loved from Rushmore, but I felt bombarded by soundtrack and title cards, manipulated by montages and perfectly arranged pastel costumes and set designs. In creating a more elaborate world with more characters, Anderson seemed to have sacrificed some real feeling, to have replaced honesty with artifice.

Years later, now that the director sits atop a mountain of Kool-Aid which a good portion of people my age indulge in wholeheartedly, and has released two more films, another major difference between Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums has become clear to me: Max Fischer, the hero of Rushmore, is a poor barber’s son, while the Tenenbaums, loosely based on J.D. Salinger’s fictional Glass family from the Upper East Side, are filthy rich.

The difference didn’t occur to me at the time; but since then, Anderson has made The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (or as I like to call it, The Tenenbaums Underwater but Much, Much Worse, and the Guy Singing David Bowie Songs in Portuguese is the Only Thing that Makes the Movie Bearable) and The Darjeeling Limited, in which money is as much as a given as the New York skyline in a Woody Allen movie, or strong women having a crisis in an Almodóvar. In Tenenbaums, and certainly in Life Aquatic, some of the flatness which strikes me as so inappropriate in the face of life-changing problems like meeting one’s father for the first time late in life, or falling in love with your own sister, could be accounted for because a whole set of problems which do exist for a significant percentage of the world’s population are eliminated here.

Wealth is still a character in Rushmore, represented by Rushmore itself, the exclusive private school Max attends, and by Bill Murray’s character, a rich businessman who donates generously to the school. But Max himself, the character we’re rooting for, is not rich. He’s a barber’s son (like Charlie Brown; anyone else pick up on that?), and ashamed of it: he tells people his father’s a surgeon. When the film came out, Anthony Lane wrote that Bill Murray’s expression of confusion, then understanding, when he meets Max’s father, in his barber shop, scissors and comb in hand, was his favorite film moment of that year. So it’s not that Anderson doesn’t know how to tell a poor boy’s tale; he’s just abandoned it, for some reason.

Rushmore also ventured into territory Anderson has steered clear of since: when Max is kicked out of Rushmore, he goes to a local public school— a real, honest-to-goodness, working class public school. The vibrant pastel palette of Tenenbaums and Life Aquatic makes the washed-out grays of the public school scenes in Rushmore look like Italian neorealism.

Finally, in The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson travels back to poor country… but this is the new Wes Anderson, who’s become so comfortable in the world of uber-wealth. India is given the pastel treatment; he can’t gloss over the country’s poverty completely, but still, everywhere the brothers travel looks downright pleasant. Some critics have accused the film of being racist, and it’s hard not to see their point. Traveling around India on a luxury train is the ultimate domain of the Ignorant American, watching the realities of an impoverished environment from a safe distance, and in extreme comfort that bears no resemblance to the way most of the country’s inhabitants live. Anderson may think he’s making that argument with this movie by making his protagonists obnoxious, petty caricatures of wealth (Jason Schwartzman’s character brings along not only his iPod, but Bose speakers to plug it into), but more often than not, we’re in their position, regarding the Indians they encounter as nothing more than local color. Besides, we know Anderson, we know his work: why should he expect us to suddenly wag our fingers at these characters, who bear such a strong resemblance to every sympathetic character we’ve met in this director’s world?

Anjelica Huston makes a brief appearance in The Darjeeling Limited as the boys’ mother who has moved to India to live in a convent. She comes off as a rich white American exercising a folly, like her sons. Nothing about her is especially spiritual, except her jargon and mannerisms (when the four begin to argue, she suggests it might work better if they try to solve their problem in silence), which, like most of Anderson’s emotional content, seems superficial and based in snappy banter and snappier camera movements.

So, yes, in the end, the four men learn a lesson, in the most heavy-handed way possible: they relinquish their possessions. But being without their fancy luggage doesn’t change the technicolor version of India Anderson’s presented us with. The magnanimous display, like so many of Anderson’s big emotional moments, is so heavily manipulated by slow motion and Kinks songs that it can hardly breathe, much less tug at the heart. The purity of that Bill Murray moment in the barber shop, which lasts about three seconds and is shot head-on, with only the hushed tinny music from the transistor radio in the background, seems to be gone from this director’s vocabulary.

Back to Top