Darjeeling Express

I hadn’t been to the movies in a theater in a long time. My Friend wanted to see the Darjeeling Express. First we would go to an Indian Restaurant in Waltham for lunch.

We had a good lunch at the buffet and walked to the Movie Theater. I really didn’t know much about the movie we were to see but had heard the title floating around in various media.

The movie opened with Bill Murray running to catch a train in India. The train was leaving the station, “That’s my train”, was a recurrent theme. I like Bill Murray and enjoy his films so I was encouraged by his appearance. Unfortunately for me and the audience it was a “cameo” and that was the last we saw of him until the credits.

The Story, or lack of story, was three brothers who hadn’t grown up, or identified their issues or resolved them, rushing through the vibrant Indian landscape making fools of them selves.

Supposedly they were on a “Spiritual” quest and had some rituals to perform. The Ritual turned out to be blowing on a feather and then burying it. It made me, as a fellow American, want to crawl under my seat and hide. Here they were in a Culture of long spiritual traditions going back thousands of years and this was all they could come up with? Finally they were kicked off one of the trains. What took the train personnel so long?

After and experience with death in an Indian Village, the most rich and interesting part of the film, our end stage adolescents find their mother in a pathetic “convent” populated with native children in uniform who are in the process of being robbed of their language and culture. There is Angela Huston, another cameo, as the mother. Who talked her into taking this part? Did she read the script?

In short I think this movie is the worst I’ve ever seen. No wonder one of the “stars” is suicidal. If this were the best parts I could get I would be thinking about suicide too, or at least changing my profession.