Originally posted 1/4/05
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Director: Wes Anderson
Writers: Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach
Producers: Wes Anderson, Barry Mendel, Scott Rudin
Stars: Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Anjelica Huston, Jeff Goldblum, Noah Taylor, Michael Gambon, Bud Cort, Seu Jorge
It’s fitting that in addition to being an undersea explorer and cataloger of rare and exotic species, Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is also a filmmaker. We leave The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou feeling great anticipation for Zissou’s next film, though the recent work we have seen has frequently felt meandering, distracted, and missing a certain purpose. But it ended with a bang, suddenly had some guts again, and there is every reason to believe he is back in possession of his mojo.
Which is how I arrive at a most unexpected form of endorsement for this movie. I think it is interesting but imperfect, amusingly detailed but often less than gripping. But it does end very well, and with beauty. And it finds co-writer/director Wes Anderson finishing a great journey in which he has reclaimed his voice. Mostly, it makes me eagerly anticipate his next movie.
While I loved his Rushmore, my reaction to his follow-up The Royal Tenanbaums was more one of admiration and appreciation. I found it too bound up in its precious convolutions to speak to me very emotionally. Aquatic has both the virtues of the former and the vices of the latter in bounteous amount, and I ultimately see it as more of a quest than a conclusive story.
This is reflected in the plot, which is also a search. What it is a search for changes often, sometimes it seems to lose its way entirely. In the beginning Zissou unveils the first half of his latest film, in which a heretofore unseen creature he dubs a “jaguar shark” attacks and eats his dearest friend and comrade Esteban (Seymour Cassel). The audience is less than wowed, and downright appalled when he announces, matter-of-factly, that the 2nd half of the film will chronicle his upcoming efforts to track down and kill the possibly one-of-a-kind shark for revenge.
Zissou smokes a lot of marijuana and lacks aptitude for the day to day details of managing “Team Zissou”. This task usually fell to his estranged wife Eleanor (Anjelica Huston). But she has abandoned him for his grant-hogging braggart rival Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum), and Zissou is slow to come to grips with just how much this portends going wrong in his voyage.
He also has two unexpected visitors. Ned Plympton (Owen Wilson) is a “co-pilot for Air Kentucky” who believes he might be Zissou’s illegitimate son – there’s evidence both for and against this but Zissou is eager to take the young man under his wing and insists he join the expedition. And Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett) is a reporter for an oceanographic journal determined to do a cover story on Zissou which may or may not be a hatchet job; she criticizes his recent documentaries as seeming “kind of fake”.
The same charge has been leveled against Anderson about his own work over the years. And it’s hard not to question the verite of a movie whose protagonist returns home to his island compound and is told coldly by his wife in lieu of a greeting that his favorite cat has died, its throat torn out by a rattlesnake. This sort of thing is always happening in Wes Anderson movies. All of his characters are thick with eccentricities from their clothes on inwards, all of them are sad and lonely in determined, intricate ways, and we watch their experiences with little predicting what’s going to happen to them or how they’re going to react to it.
Which is the beginning of the snake-swallowing-its-tail that is the whole point of this. Zissou cannot help stage his reality ever so-slightly, it’s a natural reaction to a world he sees as too confoundingly, frustratingly designed to actually be random. He’s a fraud; but in a fraudulent world he is an inspiring one who finds a way to show you something you’ve never seen before, even if he does steal equipment, torment his unpaid interns, and beg funding from his in-laws in order to do it.
So the movie is unrealistic, is fake. But it’s so carefully, lovingly fake, like the cutaway full-size model of Zissou’s research vessel “The Belafonte” (which characters walk through and treat as the real thing) or the bouncy themes composed as temp tracks for his documentaries on cheap synthesizers, or the sea creatures themselves, created in stop-motion animation by Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Even many of the names are brand names or celebrity surnames.
The performances (save some wobbly and unsure work by Wilson) are constantly surprising and funny – Murray seems to inhabit Zissou with intimate familiarity, Blanchett is a delightful presence, and Willem Dafoe (as insecure short-pants-wearing right-hand man Klaus Daimler) works his face into the most unbelievable contortions of apoplexy, indignation and injury.
I laughed in places no one else in the theatre did, just as they chuckled at moments in which I could not see the joke. It’s that sort of movie, never dull really, though sometimes restless-making as you long for Anderson to get to some point. It is amusing all the while, and suddenly, shockingly heartbreaking when reality makes a brutal intrusion.
Is that jolt of emotion too little, or the more enhanced for coming in such a composed, minute dose? I am hardly one to judge, I can only say again that I left The Life Aquatic feeling good, willing to say I enjoyed the time I spent. I don’t think I saw a great movie, but I saw a great filmmaker figuring out, after facing distractions and temptations and the pitfalls of his rebellious and quirky approach, just how he wanted to proceed with his art.