God of Small (White) Things

Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited

The Darjeeling Limited (like all of Wes Anderson's films, to greater or lesser degrees) is like a dollhouse made of marzipan: it's delicate, sweet, and of questionable substance that's neither fulfilling nor structurally sound. You simultaneously want to protect it, admire its preciousness, and crush it to hear the satisfying thunk of its fragility.

That's to say, then, it's everything we've come to expect of Anderson's films, and everything we love about them, and everything that drives us nuts, too. (No pun intended.)

Critics have been piling on Darjeeling Limited, eager to knock Anderson's hipster specs sideways:

Like his peers Zach Braff, Noah Baumbach (who directed the excellent Squid and the Whale and co-wrote Life Aquatic), and Sofia Coppola (whose brother Roman helped write Darjeeling Limited), Wes Anderson situates his art squarely in a world of whiteness: privileged, bookish, prudish, woebegone, tennis-playing, Kinks-scored, fusty. He's wise enough to make fun of it here and there, but in the end, there's something enamored and uncritical about his attitude toward the gaffes, crises, prejudices, and insularities of those he portrays. In The Darjeeling Limited, he burrows even further into this world, even (especially?) as the story line promises an exotic escape. Hands down, it's his most obnoxious movie yet. (Jonah Weiner for Slate, "Unbearable Whiteness.")

Weiner falls short of calling Anderson racist outright, but I won't shy from the word: parts of Darjeeling made me cringe and try to hide my own white face under my hoodie.

But I have no intention of joining the critical pile-on, either. For obvious (and probably defensive) reasons, I take issue with the implication that privileged, bookish woebegones with white skin don't have stories worth watching. And I absolutely reject his conflation of Anderson's perspectives with the films of Noah Baumbach and Sofia Coppola, which I think, for all their own whiteness, are churning full of blood and guts. Anderson's movie about Americans soul-searching in an "exotic" land becomes an essay on cleverness, true; but Coppola's version of the same story, Lost in Translation, is exquisite and heartful.

Weiner also misses the fact that there's something elusively magical about the worlds of Wes Anderson: for all their preciousness (and "unbearable whiteness"), they induce another feeling that offsets the queasiness: wonder. Anderson's gift is his ability to make us marvel (and laugh) at things that would otherwise be mundane. He reminds us there's life to be found, everywhere, and it's rich and complex—even when it's made of white confection.