A little more than an hour through Wes Anderson’s new comedy-drama, “The Darjeeling Limited,” Owen Wilson – playing Francis, one of three brothers on a spiritual journey across India – stands in front of a bathroom mirror and removes the bandages that have been wrapped around his head for the entire movie.
These bandages are preposterously exaggerated – they look like the kind of thing Wile E. Coyote might turn up wearing, immediately after getting an anvil dropped on his head – so when they finally come off, it’s a shock to realize that they’re covering up serious wounds.
Beneath the dressing, Francis’ skin is pallid and purple, his blond hair is grimy and matted, and an enormous scar runs along the side of his head.
A few scenes later, Francis makes an even more poignant revelation: This injury, which he has told everyone was caused by an accident, was in fact the result of his deliberately crashing his motorcycle.
And even if you know nothing about Wilson’s personal struggles and his apparent suicide attempt in August, this scene – and especially the halting, roundabout way in which Francis confesses to his brothers (Jason Schwartzman and Adrien Brody) and mother (Anjelica Huston) – carries an unexpected sting.
We can no longer look upon Francis as a sunbeam-infused optimist with the pesky habit of ordering dinner on behalf of his brothers.
Instead, we’re offered a sobering reminder that sometimes the only way tortured souls can carry on living is by tending to everyone else’s problems and trying to make the world laugh.
As a movie, “The Darjeeling Limited” is a grating, crushing failure; Anderson (“Rushmore,” “The Royal Tenenbaums”) has allowed the quirky flourishes and precious affectations that punctuated his previous movies to completely obliterate story and character development.
But it also features the best and bravest acting Wilson has ever done – a performance that might just point the way forward for this troubled soul, professionally and personally.
After years of repeating himself, playing the same nasally voiced, easy-does-it stoner dude in movies such as “Meet the Parents,” “Wedding Crashers” and even the animated “Cars,” Wilson has finally taken on a role with some dark undercurrents. Perhaps more important, for the first time since his debut feature, “Bottle Rocket,” he seems to have found a creative outlet for his personal demons.
The “Bottle Rocket” performance, 11 years ago, is unlike anything we saw from him again. He plays Dignan as a bundle of nervous energy, half-sweet and half-grating – he’s like a shaken soda can desperate to burst. Wilson’s great skill is that, even as he pokes gentle fun at the often clueless character, he never loses touch with his poignant core: This is a fundamentally troubled guy who, no matter how doggedly he tries, seems incapable of making life go his way.
But studios weren’t necessarily interested in the subtlety and pathos that Wilson might bring to a part. Instead, they saw him as a new kind of ’90s joker, a slacker icon who could float through action movies (“Anaconda”) and comedies (“Meet the Parents,” “Shanghai Noon”) alike. But within a stretch of a few years, Wilson turned up in one awful buddy movie after another, playing basically the same character until he was completely typecast and filmmakers could no longer see him doing anything else.
Anderson is the best friend to whom he would return every few years to work on a new script. The two collaborated again on 1998’s “Rushmore” and 2001’s “The Royal Tenenbaums.”
In public, Wilson had mastered the art of seeming like the smooth and hip movie star – the guy without a problem in the world. The reality is probably much different: Like most writers, he used his work as the means to express deep frustrations and disappointments that he kept inside.
Except that the collaborations with Anderson stopped. Wilson said in interviews that he was too busy acting to carve out time to work on a new script. And while it would be reductive and insensitive to draw a direct line from the end of Wilson’s screenwriting with Anderson to his recent personal crisis, the sad fact is this: Since 2001, Wilson hasn’t made a single movie worth remembering.
On Oct. 4, Wilson appeared onstage at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, alongside Anderson and his “Darjeeling” co-stars, for the film’s Los Angeles premiere. It was his first public appearance since late August, and, by all accounts, Wilson looked healthy and happy. But he also was careful to avoid the media line, leaving his colleagues to answer the incessant, tasteless questions about his mental well-being.
For perhaps the first time, he has the chance to be himself, both in his art and in his life. And as comics as wide- ranging as Charlie Chaplin, Steve Martin and Bill Murray have shown, it’s usually clowns who are secretly crying inside who have the most enduring legacies.
In movies like “Starsky and Hutch” and “Night at the Museum,” Wilson makes us chuckle for a couple of hours. But when he pours his heart and soul onto the screen, as he did in “Bottle Rocket” and “Rushmore,” and as he does for a few fleeting moments in “The Darjeeling Limited,” he makes the sort of connection with an audience that is invaluable – and that might just be his salvation.
