Is ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ Wes Anderson’s Best Film?

Which Wes Anderson movie is his best? It’s a common argument amongst film geeks. In fact, I just had this argument again yesterday with a friend of mine over dinner. There are no right or wrong answers, necessarily; each of them are unique and singular in their own little ways. It’s more a matter of which Anderson movie affected you the most. For some, that movie is “Rushmore.” For others, it’s “The Royal Tenenbaums,” or “Moonrise Kingdom,” or “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.” For Nerdwriter1, however, that film is “The Darjeeling Limited,” one that’s often overlooked in Anderson’s filmography. And he explains why that one is his favorite in his latest video essay, the fittingly-titled “Why I Love The Darjeeling Limited.”

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The 2007 comedy finds three dysfunctional, upper middle class brothers brought together on a spiritual trip to India after the one brother, Francis (Owen Wilson), suffers a near-fatal car crash. Francis says the trip is about trust, but in reality, it’s about communication. These brothers haven’t spoken to one another in over a year, and any semblance of coherent conversation is now lost amongst one another. As Nerdwriter argues, their first conversation on the train tells you everything you need to know about these brothers, while also playing out like a hilarious fragmented group chat where one-or-all three brothers have terrible cell service.

As a result, “The Darjeeling Limited” ultimately sees the brothers communicating to themselves through each other via a series of one-side conversations throughout the film, and it focuses on how they all grieve with the death of their father. Through some of Anderson’s signature techniques and visual motifs, the filmmaker evaluates these characters and lets them speak for themselves. However, Anderson also uses the popular Hitchcock technique, “The Kuleshov Effect,” known as the relationship between two shots, in order to fill in the dots on missing information, letting us know more about these brothers without explicitly stating it.

While the video editor doesn’t consider Anderson’s fifth film his “formal peak,” he believes “The Darjeeling Limited” is ultimately the most human of his films to date, with the limited scope providing the deepest character evaluations of all his films. And while it’s not often considered the auteur’s best work, he makes a good case. Check it out below to see if you agree.