Thursday Night at the Hammer

Last Thursday, I cancelled my training appointment to go see an advanced screening of Wes Anderson's new movie at the Hammer with our neighbors and MJC. After seeing it, I was so inspired I'd meant to sit down and write about it right away...but within a week is fine I suppose.

I love this paragraph so much from the Carina Chocano of the LA Times
It's hard to approach a new film by Wes Anderson without feeling like you've walked into an argument. There's something about his dollhouse aesthetic, his storybook formality, his miniaturist's attention to detail and his dogged belief in the power of objects to elicit the most oblique and recondite emotions that seriously sets people off. Why is a question for another paragraph, but needless to say it's exactly this staunch commitment to artificiality that makes his work what it is.

I read a couple of reviews after watching the movie that dove into the movie as a racist portrayal of India and a couple of other odd points of contention like that. The whole time I watched the movie I was not thinking about India in particular and I think you get lost if you do.

This movie is best watched with a simple quiet agreement at the beginning that you will let go and just allow yourself to get swept away. I did.

The movie opens with a short film revolving around Jason Schwartzman's character. It was opaque and started right in the middle so it was challenging to decipher what was happening, why and to whom - but you found yourself still caring, still feeling romantic and lonely and wounded just like the characters you see in the story. The short film ends without much being spelled out and as Darjeeling begins you see Bill Murray's character racing for the Darjeeling Limited - a quaint train in the middle of a desert.

As the brothers all arrive in the train car you begin to see a picture of each of their wounds and insecurities as well as coping mechanisms and how they all relate to one another. Owen Wilson's character has lured them here for a spiritual journey and as an attempt to reconnect as brothers. As the train zooms forward you are more focused on the events inside the car and not its destination. The history of this family unravels before you in the bits and pieces that the grown brothers let out. Present, past and future are all juxtaposed against one another but none of them are ever truly revealed.

I felt as though the moving train was a symbol for time and that the characters are all templates of actions that would happen, actions that were almost fated to happen or had already happened. As you learned about the parents of these three twisted boys you almost wonder if they are their parents. Owen Wilson repeats several turns of phrase through the journey and when the boys reach their mother - we learn the phrases are hers. Adrian Brody's characters wears his father's glasses, which he picked up after the funeral. There are multiple fatherhood themes that surround him throughout the film- his refusal to let his father go by insisting on wearing the glasses that make him sick, the fact that he is about to have a child himself but is not with the expecting mother and, when all three men dive into a river to save three drowning boys you wonder if they are trying to save themselves and if the boys really exist at all. Then Adrian Brody is unable to save his child, the one he went after is the only one who drowns.

I was delighted to watch the entire film and it was one of the first times in a long while where I left the theatre charmed and questioning at the same time. When it was fresh in my mind I had a dozen questions and theories, which seem to have faded more now.

Although I wrestled with the decision to skip the gym, I had such a better night for allowing myself this experience.