Fans of Wes Anderson’s dysfunctional comedies will enjoy this potty quest by three American brothers to find their long-lost mother in India. Their railway journey across Rajasthan in a rickety beast of a train called the Darjeeling Limited is a mobile midlife crisis. Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman spend half the film wondering how they are related, and the other half popping pills and trying to murder each other.

It’s a strangely damp ending to a marvellous edition of The Times BFI London Film Festival. The neurotic comedy feels weak and out of joint. The emotional slapstick is deeply shallow. And so is the mission to find a mother none of them owns up to liking.

Anjelica Huston is cheeky casting as the final maternal stop – not because she has converted to Catholicism and become a nun, but because she has no great interest in her grown-up sons.

This is entirely understandable. Wilson is perfectly obnoxious as the bossy oldest brother whose head is wrapped in bandages after a suicidal motorcycle accident. The gloomy middle brother, played by Brody, is almost permanently disengaged from the fray because the wife he wants to divorce is about to give birth to his first child. And the sex-mad youngest brother (Schwartzman) resents every second he has to spend with either of them. They are a truly mournful collection of clowns.

Their nagging would not look out of place in the sophisticated middle-class milieu of Anderson’s superior comedy The Royal Tenenbaums. But against the majestic scenery of the desert these goons look decidedly parochial. That is the questionable joke, and the long-distance challenge that faces the brothers. Can they shed their marital baggage and fraternal inhibitions and bond? Will they look up from their navels and embrace the colourful dusty world they are travelling through? It takes a huge effort to care, and the search for a spiritual epiphany is absurd.

Anderson’s best moments are his small surreal touches. There’s a wonderful throw-away scene where the camera slides like a knife through train compartments full of childhood memories and characters from the past. But the tics and mannerisms of the actors themselves are an acquired taste.

There’s only one performance that rings true in this shambolic odyssey: it’s incidental, and it’s played by a local Indian (a wonderful turn by Irfan Khan) whose son is drowned. That apart, the comedy bumbles along in its own hermetically sealed world. It feels cruel to judge one of the few big art-house comedies in the festival against so many strong films about myth. But there are few quests as mythical as the search for one’s mother, and it helps to know where to get off.

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