I've put up some preliminary thoughts about The Darjeeling Limited over at culturemonkey. There are spoilers, so I wouldn't actually recommend that you read what I've written until you've seen the movie—but I hope you'll come back and read it when you have. (Be sure and watch "Hotel Chevalier" first; not playing the short with the movie is an abomination.) Here's the medium version:
More overtly comedic than any of Anderson's other films, with more than a few surprisingly slapsticky exchanges, Darjeeling is in other ways the most overtly tragic, facing head-on nostalgia's unforgiving brutality: our scars don't heal, the dead don't rise, the things we have lost do not return to us. But this brutality is matched in the same breath with a fuller vision of what redemption must mean, one that promises us not a return or replacement of the thing we lack but the ability to live our lives without it.The short version may come as something of a relief: it's extremely good.
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