An in-group family affair in plot, makers and players, The Darjeeling Limited has staggered screenings at two Lincoln Center theaters as opening night North American première for the 45th New York Film Festival. Co-writing and –producing with a number of his habitual collaborators, director Wes Anderson acknowledges India’s first color film, Renoir’s The River/Le Fleuve, as inspiration for this seriocomic combination of that former jewel in the British crown, her fabled fabulous trains, and the allegedly spiritual search of three estranged brothers.

Prefaced by the dozen minutes of his Hotel Chevalier, integral to the feature at the same time that it is extraneous -- and why this one particular vignette only of three or more possibilities? -- the action opens with, first, a conservatively suited and hatted Westerner, and then a taller one in tinted glasses, dashing to board the rear platform of the blue title train, both burdened with wildlife-engraved, monogrammed and numbered leather bags.

Too slow afoot, the former vanishes only to show up momentarily in one of several imagined railway compartments, to be identified as The Businessman (Bill Murray) but presumably the father run over by a New York City taxi a year ago. The successful younger sprinter is Peter Whitman (Adrien Brody), loaded with personal effects appropriated from that dead father and avoiding the reality of his own imminent Stateside fatherhood.

Aboard are the other two brothers with whom there has been no contact since the funeral -- later humorously if jarringly flashed back to--each of the three bearing emotional baggage as well as the same telltale matched luggage laboriously thrust at us throughout. Youngest is short mustached Jack (Jason Schwartzman, also co-writer), the insecure but successful seducer tracked in the “preface” to his Paris hotel by Natalie Portman’s bruised but libidinous semi-ex-girlfriend. The siblings have been summoned to this train heading towards the Himalaya foothills by Francis (Owen Wilson), the tallest and, as the eldest, seeking reconciliation among them on what he envisions as a minutely itinerary-ed spiritual journey.

Withholding for now their actual emotional and geographical destination, control-freak Francis hatched this peace-making mission after what he presents as a near fatal car accident, resulting in thoughts of his brothers and in his present cane and foam pads held in place by yards of head bandages. (Later disclosure of the circumstances of the “accident” is a chill in light of real off-screen happenings.) Gulping down local over-the-counter semi-narcotic panaceas while bickering to salve individual egos, the three travel north across Rajasthan and the Great Indian Desert, unveiling scars, resentments, fears and personalities.

Fearing eventual divorce, Peter does not tell seven-plus-month pregnant wife Alice (Camilla Rutherford) where he is until a very late call on a conveniently working phone. Jack, too, uses improbably efficient lines in the middle of nowhere to eavesdrop on his former girl’s voice messages but is already into on-train sex with its sweet lime stewardess Rita (a first feature for Amara Karan), whom he will later accuse of using him to stoke her chief steward husband’s (Waris Ahluwalia) jealous fires. A writer who mines others’ lives for material, Jack soon is soulfully eying another, Bengal Lancer line stewardess.

Childish and irresponsible with their women, he and Peter are, like organizer Francis, deep-down fixated on their mother Patricia (a cold Anjelica Huston), who they feel always left them, decided not to return for the burial from the remote church orphanage of which she has become head nun, and who, despite warning them away, is the destination Francis has kept secret. Jack for no reason barefoot from the “preface,” Francis loses one of an overpriced pair of shoes, Peter walks around in pink boxer underwear, as they acquire cobras and flower garlands and whatnot in a series of mishaps that become not so much predictable as unsurprising.

The American nebbish humor that accompanies them like their skin contrasts with the calm wisdom of the people along their way. Even in tragedy such as the drowning of a young son whom a shocked Peter cannot quite save, the inborn dignity of Indians cannot but affect the travelers. Aside from a late, out-of-place Rolling Stones’ “Play with Fire,” a score largely from Indian cinema (some of it composed by Satyajit Ray and Ravi Shankar) lends underplayed tranquility to this background that may contain the seeds for inner peace. If the outcome is foreseeable and the film overstays itself a little even at ninety-one minutes, the pilgrimage is commendable though not enlightening.

(Released by Fox Searchlight and rated "R" for language.)