The Darjeeling Limited

Wes Anderson’s fifth feature relies again on the filmmaker’s familiar stylistic flourishes—all those snappy camera moves, the painstakingly diorama-like compositions, the stirring mod-rock-over-slo-mo soundtrack. Sometimes it works, sometimes it bugs. Three American brothers, well played by Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman (who co-scripted with Anderson and Roman Coppola), try to remedy their estrangement with a train trip through India. Against an array of vivid set pieces, invitingly photographed by cinematographer Robert Yeoman, the quirky young men tuck into their old wounds and endure variously inspired comic misadventures. Anderson in India seems a lot like the Beatles in India: accidentally chauvinistic and forgivably overboard, probably more self-enchanted than creatively productive, but too open-hearted to abhor and worth watching if you care where popular culture goes. Could be nowhere, of course, one of those life journeys on which we begin as pilgrims but wind up merely as tourists.