Not one to let a good idea go to waste that Wes Anderson is he? I hadn't seen this before, but I had seen The Royal Tenenbaums and so it feels like I have. This is more or less the same- a quirky offbeat drama featuring a dysfunctional middle-class family learning to love themselves and one another in unusual circumstances- in fact it's the same. And less.
Owen Wilson plays Owen Wilson as always, Adrien Brody looks a bit uncomfortable as his brother and Jason Schwartzman plays a third brother. No-one really stands out either positively or negatively. The dialogue is arch and stilted but not as clever as it probably looked on paper. There are a couple of wasted cameos from Anjelica Huston and Bill Murray (who appears to have been flown to the Indian location and back just to run and fail to catch a train for fuck's sake!). It all smacks of a film made by a man who believes he can do no wrong and will do whatever enters his head, however ill thought-out or unnecessary.
The film looks great and has a fantastic soundtrack but I could put my MP3 player on shuffle and flick through a book of postcards to get that. 3/10
