The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT opus40 DOT org)December 27th, 2004
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU
Directed by Wes Anderson
R, 118 minutes
WET AND DRY
A Wes Anderson movie is probably as much at the mercy of the mood you're in as anything else. That is not to say there isn't plenty else. Anderson's movies are packed with matter, as dense as black holes; and either they suck you in, or they remain so obscure that not even light escapes.
I was not won over by Anderson's last movie, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). It started with a lot of promise, but seemed eventually to suffocate in its own idiosyncratic embrace. But something about The Life Aquatic enchants from the first scene, and never lets go. That scene unfolds in a grand Italian hall, perhaps at a film festival, with a screening of the latest aquatic documentary by undersea legend Steve Zissou (Bill Murray). The Jaguar Shark (Part 1) tells the terrible tale of the devouring of Zissou's partner (Seymour Cassel) by the title character, a shark so rare as to hardly register as mythical. It and the actual devouring are not captured on film, and must be taken on faith ("I dropped the camera," explains Zissou.) The audience watches, nonplussed. His next project, Zissou declares, will be Part 2 – going after the jaguar shark and killing it. "Why," someone asks, "would you kill so rare a creature?" The grizzled captain shrugs. "Revenge," he says.
The delivery is laconic – Anderson uses laconic the way the Three Stooges use pies – and it sets the tone. There will be plenty of action, including an attack on the high seas by pirates, a couple of shoot-outs with the lead flying as thick as cream, and a daring island rescue, but it all unfolds with a cool, ironic distance. Occasionally that lassitude leads the movie into doldrums, but it's never long before enough of a breeze picks up to get it tacking again along it's oddball, erratic course.
At that Italian screening Zissou meets Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), a young co-pilot for Air Kentucky who is a lifelong fan of the documentarian, and possibly also his son from a distant liaison. After some wary circling, he bonds with the young man, and welcomes him onto his ship, the Belafonte, as a member of his crew. That crew includes the loyal mate Klaus Daimler (Willem Dafoe), who loves Zissou like a father and is not happy to see a new son taking his place. Also on board from time to time are Zissou's wife Eleanor (Angelica Huston), who is generally acknowledged to be the brains of the outfit; her ex-husband Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum), a rival for Zissou's underwater supremacy, and also for the affections of Eleanor; the pregnant journalist Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett, actually pregnant herself and acting for two), along to write a magazine story on Zissou's vengeful quest for the killer shark; Oseary Drakoulias (Michael Gambon), Zissou's shifty producer; and a Tagalog-speaking "bond company stooge", played by Bud Cort, who will be all but unrecognizable to those who remember him as the morbid adolescent from Harold and Maude. There is also a crewman who strums a guitar and sings David Bowie songs in Portuguese.
The Belafonte (a riff on Jacques Cousteau's boat, the Calypso) is constructed in a cutaway with one side sliced off, so that the camera can glide past the walls from room to room showing off the vessel's wonders, which include a sauna and a laboratory filled with thrift-shop equipment. When the camera pulls back for a wide shot of the cutaway ship with its warren-like layout of rooms and cabins, it's reminiscent of an illustration in a children's storybook.
The movie has many of the hallmarks of an adventure, but the real adventure is more in the telling than in the plot. Anderson and his actors keep everything slightly off-kilter, so that even as you think you know where a scene is going it never goes quite there, or never along the route you expect. It's like walking down a winding staircase on which the risers have been constructed at subtly random heights.
A key to the movie's success is the performance of Bill Murray, whose detached, vaguely out-of-touch egocentricity is magnetic enough to hold together the Belafonte's motley crew as he pursues his Ahab-like goal. You get a sense of a man who was once considerably more that he is today, or at least would like to think so. A string of hit documentaries on the ocean's depths has dried up and faded into the past, so that financing is now hard to come by, and self-doubt ("What happened to me? Did I lose my talent?") is a new, assertive shipmate. As he embraces and deceives his newfound son Ned, you can see a family resemblance to the character Murray played in Rushmore, an earlier Anderson movie. The rest of the cast is consistently wonderful, all breathing the same tired air and walking the same uneven ground. Particularly good are Huston, Dafoe, and Blanchett.
Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson have been friends and collaborators since they were undergraduates at the University of Texas, and this is the first of their films on which Wilson has not coauthored the screenplay with Anderson. That job was filled this time by Noah Baumbach, whose Kicking and Screaming (1995) shares a similar temperament. The two are currently at work on The Fantastic Mr. Fox, an adaptation of a Roald Dahl book.
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