..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

The Darjeeling
Limited

Directed by Wes Anderson
(2007, *** 1/2)

Any picture that opens with Bill Murray wearing a trim, too-small fedora poked atop his head while in suit and tie in a getaway taxi through the crowded, colorful streets of a city in India is showing all the right signs for pleasure to come.

In fact, Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson's serio-comic follow-up to the (at least to these eyes) disastrous The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (written with co-star Jason Schwartzman and second-unit director Roman Coppola) is the best thing he's done since Rushmore. Storybook preciousness of color and frame recur, as does the sight of thirtysomething male characters working out wounds bequeathed by their fathers. Still, there's an intriguing growth in temperament. While some elements still might make the construction of the movie seem not everything but the kitchen sink, but a kitchen sink full of kitchen sinks, matters deepen, moods darken.

Three brothers are brought together a year after the death of their father by Francis (Owen Wilson, whose head is garishly bandaged for most of the movie), the emotionally tone-deaf, millionaire control freak of the family. Jack (Jason Schwartzman) is a writer, and Peter (Adrien Brody), well, he just looks like he's always ready to burst into tears, except at the prospect of purchasing a poisonous snake. This is mismatched casting of siblings that is almost as bold as Luis Buñuel having two actresses interchangeably play the same role in That Obscure Object of Desire. Yet their constipated, passive-aggressive pissiness is of a suit. Soon you are convinced by this trio, this Larry, Curly and Moe with the vapors.

The notion of naming the three brothers Francis, Jack and Peter, seems to superficially allude to the 1970s Francis Coppola, Jack Nicholson and Peter Bogdanovich. Anderson is a pal of Bogdanovich, and co-writer Roman Coppola is Francis' son and Schwartzman is Francis' nephew—and an allusion to the Beatles' guru-hopping with Schwartzman always in trim suit and barefoot, a la a very alive Paul. A one-note in-joke, perhaps, but once on the train, Jack does work Nicholson moves on a stewardess, Rita (Amara Karan), who has the widest, the brightest, the wettest brown eyes, barefoot in emerald fish scale-patterned silk, proving that at long last Anderson is getting moony about a less brooding form of female beauty. (A later shot of a woman's bare back seen from a mirror inside a compartment has a light whiff of Velasquez to it.)

But the movie snaps to from the brother's petulant behavior after the classic line blurted by one of the brothers, "Look at these assholes." What follows changes the trio, and the movie, for the better. Anderson admits drawing on Jean Renoir's great The River. At this point the movie is no longer "The Life Sub-Asian With Wes Anderson": The Darjeeling Limited transforms into a different, unruly beast, a knowing self-critique of moneyed ego-tourism performed by the well-off with unexamined lives. The film is not dismissive, yet its characters' shortcomings are fully on display. The world wounds. Cauterization fails. Suicide attempts are bad. Mourning requires the rest of your life. (And if Anjelica Huston plays your mother, you will wonder why she's chosen such a distant retreat.)

-Ray Pride