Before we had museums, wealthy people made their own. They were called wonder cabinets, personal collections of natural and manmade curiosities contained inside handsome wooden boxes for visitors to peruse. Some wonder cabinets were intended as works of art. Others were staunchly dedicated to the advancement of science. All revealed containable marvels to a hungry human eye: seashells, gemstones, bat skeletons, narwhal tusks.
In our own day, real wonder cabinets have disappeared, but the director Wes Anderson continues the tradition. His movies, since Bottle Rocket, have been cinematic wonder cabinets, each a story contained in an elaborately designed box, each corner of the box delicately partitioned from the rest, each holding a human oddity or marvel. His wonder cabinets are even more spectacular than the originals because, when they work, they move. The best, Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, imitate narrative like chameleons imitate flowers. They seem to actually tell a story.
Others, like Bottle Rocket and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou don't quite pull off this illusion. They sit in their boxes and remain inert, but viewing them isn't a strain because the boxes themselves exhibit a singular loveliness. Here and there, within the partitions, an amazing character occupies our attention to such an extent that the whole seems to disappear.
Unfortunately, his latest, The Darjeeling Limited, lasts for about two hours and doesn't move at all. In most of his earlier efforts, Anderson built his cabinets with the utmost artificiality-the school in Rushmore, the house in Tenenbaums, the submarine in The Life Aquatic-and then populated them with recognizable human beings.
You could almost write a mathematical equation about the balance of force between artifice and reality, between toy and flesh, in Anderson's movies. The greater the balance, the better the movie. Rushmore comes alive in the tension between the labyrinth of the school and the wit and cunning of Max Fisher, played by Jason Schwartzman. Rushmore, the school, is like a test in some ancient Greek myth, and Max must find his way out with the help of a beautiful woman, his teacher, and a wise old man, her lover; it doesn't hurt that the wise old man is Bill Murray.
In The Royal Tenenbaums, the children must escape the house where they were raised-and damaged. And the wise old man is the ruthless king, played by Gene Hackman. All of this plays well in wonder cabinet world, because the richly detailed conceit of the magical house holds the nastiness and liveliness of its inhabitants like a bottle holds fermenting wine. We need no explanations. We get it. We drink it.
But in The Darjeeling Limited, the thing has been poorly built from the start and then filled with dolls and puppets rather than people. At first, all seems comfortably Andersonian. We have the train of the title, one more version of the school, the house and the submarine in the earlier movies. Bill Murray is running for the train. We hear cool music. There is slow motion. This is the Wes we love!
What goes wrong is India. The train travels through India, one of the most fantastically interesting countries on the planet, a geographical molotov cocktail thrown through the window of any and all wonder cabinets, and a place that torches Anderson's movie like a villager sets fire to Frankenstein's castle. His characters have a chance of seeming real until they encounter India. Once they interact with the country, we no longer buy their reality.
When a catastrophe occurs, we should feel the characters shudder, as if awakened from a dream. They just lie there. The late appearance of Anjelica Huston in her worst performance of all time doesn't help matters. The brief cameo by Bill Murray seems too cruel for words.
I love Wes Anderson's wonder cabinets. I hope that he keeps building them. But I would advise him to take two rules of art into account. First, on screen, and in life, wonder cabinets must contain creatures that we want to see. Two, they should never be confused for life itself. They are containers for marvels that have been stolen out of life. If he wants to go to the place where the theft occurred, he may have to lay down his hammer and nails and head for the door.
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John Marks is a novelist, journalist and a former 60 Minutes producer. His first novel, The Wall, was named a New York Times Notable Book in 1998. His second, War Torn, made Publishers Weekly's Best of 2003. His third novel, Fangland, appeared in January 2007 and has been optioned for a feature film by Hilary Swank. His 60 Minutes segment 'Submission', about the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, received a 2006 Gracie Allen award from the Foundation of American Women in Radio and Television for Best Hard News Feature. John's first work of non-fiction, Reasons to Believe, a portrait of American Christianity, will be published by the Ecco Press, an imprint of Harper Collins, in February 2008. For more on John and his work (including his latest documentary project), visit John's Blog at www.purplestateofmind.com.
