The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

I suppose this review should start with some context. I'm a huge Wes Anderson fan. Check out the previous post entitled "Wes Side" (what a great pun...so glad I went with that title...) for more details. Basically, Rushmore could be considered a personal favorite movie of all time, and Bottle Rocket and Royal Tennenbaums are both movies to which I return with great regularity and reverence.

Which makes the following sentence really really hard to type: Despite its immense likeability, gorgeous cinematography and home run comic performance from Bill Murray, Life Aquatic fails to achieve the greatness of the remainder of the Anderson canon.



The problems with the film are hard to define exactly. It looks, sounds and acts like typical Anderson. All his trademarks are there: a beautiful soundtrack combining original music by Mark Mothersbaugh with classic rock songs, a brilliant ensemble cast of performers, gloriously fleshed-out, detailed backgrounds, interstitials and sets, and a bittersweet, melancholy sensibility off-setting a great deal of verbal wit and astute observation.

And the story sounds like another delightful riff ripped from one of the most imaginative minds in American film today: Aging oceanographer and documentarian Steve Zissou (Murray, as cranky and bitter as he's been since Groundhog Day) and his team of oddball assistants (including a Teutonic Willem Dafoe, in the films silliest performance) set out on an expedition to film and then kill the possibly non-existent jaguar shark, who previously devoured Zissou's partner and best friend. Coming along for the ride are a pregnant British journalist (Cate Blanchett), Zissou's estranged wife (Angelica Houston), and a young pilot from Kentucky who may or may not be Zissou's long lost son (Wilson). Desperate for a hit following a string of uninteresting flops, Zissou pushes the limits of his men, and common sense, in his obsessed quest for undersea revenge.

Sounds perfect, right? Touching family drama, adventure on the high seas, an ensemble comedy with Bill Murray. What's not to like?

First off, there's a flatness to the proceedings, an air of artificiality that the movie never overcomes. Sure, Anderson's films have always taken place in some sort of tangential universe of quirk, a hermeneutically-sealed work in which bizarre, eccentric personalities intermingle, exploring their neuroses in their own patient manner, and Life Aquatic seems no different. But it's more cartoony, less fully realized. Part of this (I think) comes from genre: all of Anderson's previous films have been straight-ahead comedies.

Rushmore follows the classic format of the coming-of-age story, even drawing early comparisons in reviews to The Graduate, despite having no real connection to that movie. Royal Tennenbaums has a wider scope, following the lives of an entire family of people over several decades, but it also follows the classic structure of a film about a dysfunctional family reuniting under pressured circumstances, a topic explored endlessly in the history of cinema.

With Aquatic, Anderson attempts an adventure movie, and this is the crucial misstep.
Anderson's working with a larger canvas here, and with a new co-screenwriter (Noah Baumbach, filling in for Owen Wilson, who still appears in the film), and he doesn't make the transition seamlessly. The film's initial 15 minutes, setting up all the crew members and explaining their mission, is woefully slow and overly expositional. Worse yet, much of the actual "adventure" footage is unengaging and even unnecessary. It's obvious that the bulk of the film's appeal will be the relationships and the comedy, as with all of Anderson's films, so the (multiple!) gun fights with pirates and helicopter crashes feel extraneous and occasionally tedious.

As well, the tone skips around a bit too frantically. Anderson has always had skill at mixing light and dark, combining gags with scenes of great pathos (as when Max Fischer steals into his teacher's bedroom one night pretending to have collided on his bike with a car), but here, the script zips back and forth from violence to tenderness to slapstick, it's hard to know how to feel from moment to moment.

I feel that I'm coming off overly negative. The movie is a lot of fun, a great piece of entertainment, and I would recommend catching it theatrically if at all possible. There are numerous great performances (Jeff Goldblum, in particular, shines in a small role as Zissou's main adversary), and the Portuguese renditions of classic David Bowie songs that play throughout the film are a perfect companion to the visuals. And, of course, I'd be remiss in not mentioning that Murray is hilarious in this role, making the absolute most out of every scene in which he appears. He has become one of our finest working actors, and there is just about no one I would rather spend 2 hours with in a theater.

The movie, for me, becomes an exploration of how someone's life becomes intermingled with their work. Zissou formed a crew, Team Zissou in order to make films, and they became his family. Now that the films are no longer successful, does that mean they have somehow failed one another? It's a common theme for Anderson: magnificently successful people of great promise who come to see their great potential as a curse, who sadly regret their mistakes because of how fantastic their lives could have been. In its own way, Aquatic explores these ideas with as much sincerity as any other Anderson movie, but the storytelling on the screen undercuts them as often as it highlights them.

It's hard not to be a bit disappointed when one of your favorite directors and favorite actors suffer a misstep. Anderson's films have always maintained a delicate balance; they're cartoonish but relatable, silly but sincere, whimsical yet sad. I'm certain he'll get back there some day, but regrettably not with this movie, which is simply well-made, professional entertainment.