Fox Searchlight Pictures

The Darjeeling Limited: limited.

The Darjeeling Limited
Directed by Wes Anderson. Written by Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman. With Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston and Amara Karan. (R)

It is nearly impossible to watch Owen Wilson in The Darjeeling Limited—uncharacteristically subdued, his head swathed in bandages—without looking for clues to the actor's widely reported recent suicide attempt. "There are so many things we don't know about each other, aren't there?" says his character's mother (Anjelica Huston). Perhaps when there is so little life on screen, one imposes it from elsewhere. In Wes Anderson's follow-up to the nearly unwatchable Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wilson plays Francis Whitman, who, having just survived a motorcycle accident, summons his younger brothers (Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman) for a train trip through Rajasthan on the occasion of the anniversary of their father's death. As they tour the state, these shallow, materialistic cultural imperialists sample spiritualism cafeteria-style, failing to engage with the locals except in the ways of male tourists. Halfway through the movie they are kicked off the train and forced to confront reality in a very contrived way.

In the press notes for the film Schwartzman says that he, Anderson and Roman Coppola began writing in Paris and then Anderson suggested that they actually go to India, and that's exactly what the underwritten screenplay feels like. It's as heavy-handed as their father's baggage, which the characters drag around with them (designed by Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton, of course).

Even without much of a script, on the train, Anderson is in his glory, the camera moving horizontally from meticulously detailed compartment to compartment, much like the tour of the ship in The Life Aquatic. The second half of the film forces Anderson to think outside the Cornell box, and his style becomes looser, actually responding to the real world's unpredictability. But since the dioramas are what make his work distinctive, I'm not sure this is a good idea. And the musical score, harvested from Satyajit Ray films, only reminds one of better movies.

As last year's American Express ad attests, Anderson still has it in him to be a great filmmaker and not go the way of those ex-prodigies from The Royal Tenenbaums. Maybe it's that he doesn't need to get out more often.

*

The Jane Austen Book Club
Written and directed by Robin Swicord, based on the novel by Karen Joy Fowler. With Kathy Baker, Maria Bello, Emily Blunt, Amy Brenneman, Hugh Dancy, Maggie Grace and Jimmy Smits. (PG-13)

If Becoming Jane hasn't put you off Jane Austen movies forever, it's worth taking a chance on The Jane Austen Book Club, Robin Swicord's film of Karen Joy Fowler's novel about a book club that meets for six months to discuss each of Jane Austen's novels. The group includes the 50-something Bernadette (Kathy Baker), 40-ish friends Jocelyn (Maria Bello) and Sylvia (Amy Brenneman), Sylvia's daughter Allegra (Maggie Grace), prudish schoolteacher Prudie (Emily Blunt), and Grigg (Hugh Dancy), a Silicon Valley geek more conversant in Lucas than Austen.

As in Austen's world, the club's members are defined by their romantic attachments: Bernadette has been married six times, Sylvia's marriage is falling apart, Prudie is a newlywed, Allegra is a lesbian who gets more action than anyone, and Jocelyn prefers her dogs. The novels parallel situations in their own lives. Jocelyn, like Emma, is a matchmaker who doesn't see what's in front of her, and Prudie, like Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, has problems with her mother (Lynn Redgrave). When it's time for Pride and Prejudice, Jocelyn and Grigg start bickering—only here the prejudice is against science fiction. "Reading Jane Austen is a freakin' minefield," says Jocelyn. Just wait till she gets to The Left Hand of Darkness.

But unlike Austen'spairings, the main romantic couplings are between older women and the younger men who find them irresistible. Even Prudie considers following her bliss with one of her students (Kevin Zegers). Male critics will call it wishful thinking and sneer at the mostly TV-grade cast. But where else can you find actresses over 40 who look their age?

The backdrop is enlightened Sacramento, where cars run on biodiesel, being a hippie is still a valid occupation and everyone recycles. The women live comfortably, but not in the perfectly appointed Architectural Digest homes of a Nancy Meyers film, and no one ever sings a Motown song into a spatula. Only Allegra's scenes with her girlfriends, which seem to exist to keep the men in the audience awake, ring false.

Fowler made her name as a science fiction writer, and the scene in a cavernous used bookstore in which Grigg expounds on the wealth of science fiction written by women is the most genuinely feminist speech in a studio picture in years. Swicord has made a movie about people reading, and talking about what they read in a way that does not condescend to the audience. It may seem schematic, but who hasn't seen one's own life reflected in a particularly perceptive novel?

*

In the Valley of Elah
Written and directed by Paul Haggis, based on the article "Death and Dishonor" by Mark Boal. With Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron, Susan Sarandon, Jason Patric and Josh Brolin. (R)

The season of movies about the war in Iraq begins in earnest with the very earnest In the Valley of Elah, Paul Haggis' follow-up to Crash. Tommy Lee Jones, looking more like Nick Park's Wallace than ever, plays a Vietnam vet investigating his son's disappearance after his return from Iraq. A former military investigator, he enlists a police detective (Charlize Theron) to help, although he is always one step ahead of her. More a cliché than a character, she is a single mother who has slept with her boss and is now stuck at her desk investigating missing pets. The bandage on her nose in later scenes can only allude to the one on Jack Nicholson's in Chinatown (a symbolic castration if there ever was one), but on a female character it doesn't make any sense. Susan Sarandon is unconvincing as Jones' wife, who seems content to stay home while her husband goes off in search of their son, although the flat dialogue and direction of her scenes don't help. In a movie that tries to score points for women combating sexism in the workplace, only Frances Fischer as a topless waitress is conferred with any dignity, which speaks volumes. And the out-of-the-blue (or out-of-Crash) racism Jones' character expresses towards a Latino soldier (Victor Wolf) less addresses prejudice in the military than gives its audience a pat on the back.

Elah was based on an article in Playboy by Mark Boal, and yet it feels utterly unfactual, like a hermetically sealed, audience-be-damned attempt at art. The military base is surrounded by a nightmarish wasteland of strip clubs and fast food joints, depicted in an unerring bleached palette by cinematographer Roger Deakins. And although the story Boal reported could have taken place in any war, Haggis uses it as an indictment of the invasion of Iraq and an opportunity to comment on the utter hopelessness of the current situation. "They should just nuke it and watch it all turn back to dust," says one of the soldiers. Bush (and occasionally Kerry, in a feeble attempt at equal time) appears in the background on TV, excerpted for maximum banality.

In the press notes Haggis says that the title, the site where David fought Goliath, is meant to evoke the young men sent into combat with little more than the five stones King Saul gave to David. The military's stinginess in providing armor aside, for a filmmaker who wears his bleeding heart on his sleeve, this seems like the kind of curious myth-twisting the neocons indulge in. I don't think you have to guess who the Iraqis think the Goliath is in this scenario. And I might point out that David won.

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