Now, as the second weekend arrives for Wes Anderson's Darjeeling Limited, it seems as if every member of the Hollywood intelligentsia (reviewers, bio fuel advocates, agents' aides, etc.) is called upon to have an up-or-down vote on the entire Anderson oeuvre. Are his archly comic but darkness-tinged films in fact Truffautian examinations of modern anomie and filial love? Or the pseudo-intellectual bleatings of a sub-Coppola retainer who worships style over substance?

Personally, I incline to the former, not just in the case of gems like Rushmore and his whimsical latest, but embracing (I can see the eyeballs going over to Go Fug Yourself even as I write this) The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. It's possible to feel warmly towards that colorfully rendered mess even if it fits into the sardonic headline prompted in The Onion by the recent arrival of Darjeeling: "New Wes Anderson Film Features Deadpan Delivery, Meticulous Art Direction, Characters With Father Issues".

The irreducible reason I count myself an Anderson loyalist are his soundtracks, which, one doesn't have to be a pop historian to know, are heavily devoted to the British Invasion. Though the Rolling stones have their innings--notably in The Royal Tenenbaums with "She Smiled Sweetly" and even more so in Darjeeling with "Play With Fire"--they really belong to Anderson's mentor Scorsese. Anderson, like Wim Wenders before him, uses the Kinks as his chief muse. He does so in cahoots with ex-Devo Mark Mothersbaugh, who also scores sections of film for him, and music supervisor Randall Poster. Interviewed by a rep from the Abkco label, who are releasing the soundtrack album, Poster says:

Wes wanted to have a unified sort of sensibility, and those [Kinks] songs appear in the film at three critical moments: one at the head of the film, one in the middle of the movie and then one at the end of the film. All three songs come from the Kinks album, Lola vs the Powerman & the Money-Go-Round. When we made Rushmore, Wes had the notion of using only Kinks songs in the film...but then we went and sort of just pursued more of the 1960s "angry young man" songs of the British invasion. For Darjeeling, we just started out with "This Time Tomorrow." It was exciting to get the permission of the Kinks; they let us use these pieces ["This Time Tomorrow," "Strangers," "Powerman"] and I think they really served the movie well. ...kind of under known songs, really. ..I really love that we used both Ray Davies and Dave Davies songs, kind of an ongoing tale of the two Davies brothers.
And our film focuses on three brothers who are sort of struggling to maintain their connection so there's a parallel there.

The album was recorded around the time the Kinks truly hated the record business. "The LP is the struggle of a band really deciding to fight back," Ray Davies has said. (They also had problems with each other. Ray, quoted from the eyar they made the LP: "Dave and I are very close, but we have this feeling toard each toehr that si almost akin to hatred. I has always been that way.") Anderson appropriates that energy to show the Whitman brothers getting energized for their mission, from the acoustic strums that accompany the trio's slo-mo sprint to catch that train to their cinematic destiny, through the surging organ that gets the song (and the brothers, if only two feet from sea level) airborne.

If "Powerman" ("Call him a name and he sits and grins/Cause everybody else is just a sucker to him") is the soundtrack's bookend to "This Time Tomorrow", the delicate job of accompanying the film's most controversial section falls to "Strangers". To describe why--beyond that it's a passage where a tragedy throws two cultures together--is to risk a spoiler. But what seems clear is that Dave Davies' almost sobbing vocal--"Holy man and holy priest/This love of life makes me weak at my knees..." is fierce reinforcement for the difficult message Anderson is brave enough to commit to film as it plays.

Because of the tapestries Anderson parades across the screen--sometimes using colors only known to devices that have six million hues--and because of the classical symmetry of his set-ups, he's often accused of being mannered and superficial. But bearing down so hard on the brush strokes may obscure what's most valuable in what seems to me an evident and determinedly humane film making heart.

Anderson's behavior around the apparent suicide attempt by his greatest collaborator ("I hope I never have to make a film without him,"
he told an industry audience before a screening) has been impeccable, and Wilson's has been brave and heartening. A poignant codicil to all he talk of a messy suicide attempt by Owen Wilson's character is what Luke Wilson's Richie Tenenbaum does to himself halfway thorough that film--deep slashes on both arms, to the strains of apparent suicide victim Elliott Smith's "Needle in the Hay" on the soundtrack, and then the rushed trip down the overlit hospital corridor.

The journey from Bruno Ganz leaning morosely on his broom for Wenders and singing the Kinks' "Too Much On My Mind" (recorded in 1965) to Bill Murray, 30 years later, watching his wife flirt with another man to the Kinks' "Nothing In this World Can Stop Me Worrying About that Girl" (recorded about six months later) is 30 years in film history. (Whereupon Murray performs history's mosty morose cannonball from the high dive.)

The initial pushback that dissed Darjeeling in part because it's the product of what Salon's Jonah Weiner describes this way: "They are zombies in fitted blazers, suffering quietly but profoundly from the same vague, paralyzing, leisure-class malaise that has plagued Anderson's heroes ever since Luke Wilson checked himself into a mental hospital for "exhaustion" in Bottle Rocket.

But the film has strong advocates--New York Magazine critic David Edelstein (alongside a picaresque feature on Anderson) noted how the wide-open landscapes of India near the film's end "save" the picture" "Visually, Anderson tries something new: He zooms in and out of his frames; he violates his own immaculate canvases. India turns out to be the perfect Wes Anderson movie set."

Peter Travers in Rolling Stone stands up for Anderson's right to grow within his themes of "broken dreams and shattered families", insisting that "an artist can spend a satisfying lifetime developing personal themes and deepening their resonance."

Finally, The New York Times' A.O. Scott captured both the postive and the neagtive: "This shaggy-dog road trip, in which three semi-estranged brothers travel by rail across India, is unstintingly fussy, vain and self-regarding. But it is also a treasure: an odd, flawed, but nonetheless beautifully handmade object as apt to win affection as to provoke annoyance."

Amen to that.

(Wes Anderson photo, September 2007, by Jemal Countess/WireImge)