One thing to be said for a Wes Anderson film, and it's no small thing, is that it bears an individual stamp. A stamp as flat as a postage stamp, as emphatic as a rubber stamp. (Whap, whap.) A well-known commodity after Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tennenbaums, The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou, Anderson favors fastidiously balanced, nailed-down compositions, the figures pinned to a shallow background like butterfly specimens. Stressing their separateness, he has no intention to hinge his shots together into a smooth and seamless line, but instead slots them into place as if on disconnected planes, setting up a clumping rhythm of starts and stops, glazing the screen with the deadest of deadpans, and erecting an invisible wall (invulnerable even to the occasional uncharacteristic zoom) between the filmmaker and his characters, freakishly feckless people, abject puppets manipulated by a man with little regard for human diversity and volition. The effect -- the unhumanness of these humanoids -- is often amusing and always distancing. The danger in the director's method is that it can be too distancing and therefore not amusing enough. (Since he always clamps a tasteful mute on the audience's merriment, the standard laugh-meter is an unreliable measure.) If this outing seems a cut above all previous ones, it may be the benefit of a real, a tangible, a substantial background against which to display his specimens: three, thirty-something brothers who have not spoken to one another in the year since their father's funeral, now heading out together on a "spiritual journey" in a first-class sleeper car across India, with the ultimate aim of tracking down their mother (a no-show at the funeral) in a convent at the foot of the Himalayas. In other words, a typical Wes Anderson operation, bringing about the insecure bonding of misaligned oddballs, but in an atypical exotic setting, the better to draw out their oddness. Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, Amara Karan, Anjelica Huston, Bill Murray. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd
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