The Darjeeling Limited

Writer-director Wes Anderson has become a brand name in Hollywood. You expect certain quirkiness to be associated with every single one of his movies. Like every major brand, it becomes increasingly more difficult for him to be original and creative in his filmmaking.

Rushmore was the movie that put his name on the map. It was new and different at the time and the audience felt a breeze of fresh air. The Royal Tenenbaums was a decent follow-up, but it started losing some freshness. When The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou rolled out, I didn’t even bother to see it after watching the trailer in the theater. Now with his new movie, The Darjeeling Limited, I was hoping that he might have challenged himself and created a movie unique from his earlier works. However, no such luck.

The Darjeeling Limited follows three American brothers on their “spiritual journey” across India. Anderson is practically repeating himself here. The characters all possess the same eccentricity found in other Anderson movies. In fact, the entire film seems like a big inside joke where only the actors understand the humor. The dialogue looks to be written on paper instead of being spoken. The situations are contrived and predictable. Also what is the deal with those slow motion shots? Does Anderson want to be the John Woo without action?

The three main actors, Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman, are competent, but they have done better in some other films. Wilson and Schwartzman could play their roles in their sleep and sometimes you do get a sense that they are phoning in their performance. For Brody, comedy does not come naturally. He struggles most of the time in the movie to keep up with his two co-stars who are veterans at comedies.

The only bright spot in the movie is Peter Sarstedt’s 1969 song Where Do You Go To (My Lovely). It is a great song and now a whole new generation gets to appreciate it.

O Jerusalem

The subject matte in O Jerusalem is better suited for a documentary instead of a fictional movie with a bunch of one-dimensional characters. The film covers the historical year of 1948 during which the state of Israel is created.

Director Milos Forman once said about message movies, “A message is important, but it should be like a fragrance. You can see a person who smells good, but you don't see the smell. You just know they smell good.” The people who made O Jerusalem clearly have never read this quote. From beginning to end, the film is permeated with peace propaganda without any new idea about how to achieve peace in the Middle East. At the end of the movie, writer-director Elie Chouraqui is apparently still worried that the audience doesn’t get his message – there is a voiceover to broadcast that peace is still possible in Middle East as long as there are people on both sides who long for peace AND a dedication before the credit to peace in Middle East. I don’t know how much thicker anyone can lay a message in a movie.

The melodrama and cheap theatrics of the film is further worsened by the miserably sentimental music score. Stephen Endelman’s score constantly pounds on the strings and our pathos. We are rarely given a second to process our own emotions without the music cue.

Except a few experienced actors such as Ian Holm (who plays Ben Gurion) and Patrick Bruel, the young actors all struggle to bring off a natural performance. JJ Feild plays Bobby, a Jewish young man caught between his duty for Israel and his friendship with an Arab man. He looks like a Jewish Jude Law but without any of Law’s acting abilities.

Overall, the whole movie is just a mess. It won’t attract any audience to see this worthy subject. Chouraqui’s last film, Harrison’s Flowers, is a realistic and touching portrait of war-torn Yugoslavia. I am surprised that the same director could have made such a terrible picture about the conflict in the Middle East. Hopefully one day someone will make an epic about the history of Israel, but O Jerusalem ain’t that movie.

Michael Clayton

Michael Clayton is a thriller without any thrill. It uses a chain of events in a class action lawsuit against a large chemical company, U/North to show the evil of big corporations in the current world.

George Clooney plays the title character Michael Clayton, a “fixer” in a prestigious corporate law firm in New York. When Arthur (played by Tom Wilkinson), a partner and lead lawyer representing U/North in a class action lawsuit against one of its products, stops taking his medication and suffers another mental breakdown, Clayton is called to clean up the mess. Soon he is pulled into a much deeper and darker plot and has to make a moral choice.

First of all, I feel that I have been misled by the movie’s trailer and critics’ reviews regarding Clayton’s role in the law firm. People have compared Clayton to Harvey Keitel’s “cleaner” role in Pulp Fiction and Point of No Return. Upon watching the film, I find it couldn’t be further away from the truth. Clayton’s role is very ambiguous and confusing to me throughout the movie. He is a non-practicing lawyer in a law firm to concentrate on doing some “dirty” work, but the “dirty” work are never clearly defined in the movie. At the beginning of the film, he is called to help handle a hit-and-run incident for a major client. He goes over to the client’s house and lays out the options for him. Is telling someone to call the police “dirty” work? When Arthur suffers the breakdown, the firm’s founder Marty (played by Sydney Pollack) once again needs Clayton to do some “dirty” work and try to commit Arthur into a psychiatric institution. Wow, is putting someone into a psych ward such a “dirty” job that firms have special personnel to handle it? Clayton is certainly nowhere near the “fixing” job Keitel gets to do in movies. When things start to spiral downward for Arthur, Clayton, the so-called “fixer” seems to be awfully naïve about corporate evil even though his full-time job is to deal with corporate corruption.

The movie is mainly told in a flashback. It can be confusing for some audience in the first ten minutes, but then the story should become clearer, although it stays dull throughout. It is a torture to watch a film when you are miles ahead of the story. When it comes to the final climax, writer-director Tony Gilroy appears to be so worried the audience may not understand the last 90 minutes are simply flashbacks that they keep repeating pieces of opening sequences to make sure we get it. Yes, we GET it and please stop insulting our intelligence with this piece of unoriginal work.

Playing a character struggling both professionally and in his private life, Clooney is his own biggest enemy. I think he tries his best to give a stellar performance, but his public image makes it difficult for audience to accept his role. When you see Clayton’s ex-wife with her current husband, you want to shout out, “How can you divorce George Clooney?” When U/North general counsel Karen (played by Tilda Swinton) walks away from Clayton in a huff, you want to say, “but this is George Clooney you are talking to.” It is quite impossible to concentrate on Clayton’s problem when you constantly see him as George Clooney.

I am very surprised and happy to see Swinton in a major US production although I wish it could be a higher quality one. She first made a name in the artsy movie world when she played nobleman Orlando in the surreally beautiful movie Orlando. Then in 1996, her role in Female Perversions is a defining moment for women in corporate America. It is a shame that movie was not viewed by more people. It is a perfect portrait of working women climbing on the corporate ladder. In that movie, she played an ambitious lawyer and her role in Michael Clayton could easily be that role ten years down the line. Swinton has always been an intense actress and in this movie, she is all wound up as one of few female executives in a large corporation. She also appears to be a few pounds heavier. Don’t get me wrong. She looks great as usual, but in Hollywood it is such a shock to see someone gain weight instead of losing weight. I don’t know if she gained weight purposely for this role or it is just a sign that she is merely a mortal like you and me going through mid-life changes.

Sydney Pollack seizes the day in this movie as a supporting role. We find him working in a relaxing and comfortable manner, completely at ease with the role he is playing. He has in recent years cornered the market of arrogant, morally indifferent big-shot roles and he is very good at it. Actually, lately he has been doing better job acting than directing.

So far this year, except Once, I haven’t seen a movie that really wows me and is truly Oscar-worthy. Once again, Michael Clayton is one of those smoke, but not true fire.