MikePadgett.com

• Director: Wes Anderson
• United States, 2007
• 

Anderson’s films are often about families or groups of individuals who form strong bonds. What’s becoming increasingly clear after seeing Darjeeling is that the director’s troupe of actors is imitating his art: almost all of the cast here seem to have appeared in multiple Anderson movies.

And Darjeeling is hardly the black sheep. It’s probably his most accessible effort yet and the humour and human story here are uncomplicated. Yet the audiences have been consistently small and the publicity was probably overshadowed by Owen Wilson’s personal troubles.

More’s the pity, because as three very different characters, Brody, Wilson and Schwartzmann are incredibly convincing siblings, travelling across India on the eponymous train and trying to make sense of each other.

• Director: Wes Anderson
• United States, 2001
• 

Wes Anderson is clearly simpatico with actors, because he coaxes out the engaging, lovable side that old cranks like Gene Hackman and Bill Murray have hidden away in the dusty recesses of their repertoires. And all that without a CGI penguin in sight.

The Royal Tenenbaums features a beautifully nuanced cast of characters who are fully paid up members of a family that’s fallen apart. Having carefully introduced each of them, Anderson and co-writer Owen Wilson let them tell their stories and bring about collective and individual redemption.

The ending is upbeat and anything but predictable whilst the glow of reunion is warm but subtle. A fine film from a consistently successful director.

• Director: Wes Anderson
• United States, 1998
• 

For many cinemagoers - myself included - Rushmore was a first peek inside the meticulous bazaar of Wes Anderson’s creative mind, unless of course you’d been lucky enough to stumble across a showing of Bottle Rocket two years before.

Looking back, with the benefit of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou as hindsight, Rushmore looks like a relatively restrained affair, but it’s a unique mind that generates this level of detail and the results evoke a child’s devotion to modelmaking.

It’s the work of a fastidious, curious mind and there’s that strange sense of real humanity which offsets a strong whiff absurdity. Rushmore is like a scale model of Anderson’s later work, with all the pieces (especially characterisation and sountrack) glueing nicely together.