Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, which screens at Rooftop Cinemas on Tuesday, remains for many the filmmaker's best work, though The Darjeeling Limited, which screens two days later, has an increasing number of admirers who claim it is more mature and complex than its predecessor. (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the Boy's Own fever dream that falls between the two, has charms of its own, but is widely considered a glorious oddity more than anything else.) Tenenbaums is the more whimsical and obsessively detailed of the pictures screening this week, like a short story published in The New Yorker and adapted for the screen by Stanley Kubrick. Anderson's third film after Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, it provides the basic story template that each of his films has followed since: a self-centred patriach (Gene Hackman's Royal Tenenbaum, in this case, with Steve Zissou and Mr Fox the other key examples) is forced to see the errors of his ways and save his dysfunctional family. The Tenenbaums—a so-called family of geniuses, who owe a lot to J. D. Salinger's equally dysfunctional Glass family—are particularly screwed up. Anderson's signature style—flat, full-frontal compositions teeming with visual detail, retro soundtrack and slow-motion tracking shots, as well as the prevalence of futura as his all-purpose font of choice—was first seen in full flight in Tenenbaums and remains essentially unchanged in Darjeeling. (The latter's opening scene, on an Indian train platform, combines the latter two of these stylistic traits to fantastic effect. The Kinks, for one thing, have never sounded better.) What does change is thematic emphasis and complexity: here, the relationship between siblings takes precedence over that between parents and children, and is underscored by a compelling critique of the American tourist and his notion of the "spiritual journey". In this sense, The Darjeeling Limited serves as a useful corrective to Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, which for all its charms was essentially an orientalist vision of the subcontinent and its people, a saccharin-sweet confirmation of Western audiences' reductive ideas about Indian-ness and its supposedly exotic essence. Anderson is contemptuous of anyone who entertains or perpetuates such ideas and goes to some length to make sure that his characters no longer do by the time they reach the final credits. Towards the end of the film, a local asks them: "What are you doing in this place?" The explanation offered in response is telling: "Well, originally, I guess we came here on a spiritual journey. But that didn't really pan out."

Review, 13 March 2010