***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Angelica Huston, Jeff Goldblum, Bud Cort, Michael Gambon, Noah Taylor, Seu Jorge, and Seymour Cassell
Directed by Wes Anderson & written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach
2004
118 min R
Bill Murray is a genius. He has turned self-loathing into an Olympic event. In his best performances, he goes past simple self-disgust to a point where he is amused at what an awful person he is. He steps back and makes jokes about his own awfulness. No one around him gets the jokes, but we do, because we’ve been watching him all along. He plays the title character in “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” an overgrown man-child living a boy’s dream way past when the dream stopped being any fun. Think of Tom and Huck as middle-aged men with wives at home, stuck on a raft complaining about how much their backs hurt. Something like that.
“The Life Aquatic” is the work of director Wes Anderson, who with writer-actors Owen and Luke Wilson crafted “Bottle Rocket,” “Rushmore,” and “The Royal Tenenbaums.” Here he works with Owen Wilson as an actor, but not a writer. His co-writer is Noah Baumbach, but “The Life Aquatic” is still very much cut from the same cloth as his previous films. Anderson’s movies are constructed from bizarre set-ups taken to their logical conclusions, awkward pauses, perfect framing that Ozu would be proud of, inept and self-pitying father figures, funny hats, and storybook characters colliding with curse words. We can never tell what, exactly, Anderson hopes to accomplish with his characters, so we’re always jumping from foot to foot with him. We never know if we’re five minutes from the end credits, or an hour.
In “The Life Aquatic,” the real world seems to have collided with the Saturday morning cartoon world of “Johnny Quest,” “Sea Lab,” or “GI Joe.” A group of boys travels the world, searching for adventure, occasionally fighting evil, with matching uniforms, a secret island base, and all manner of nifty equipment, trained dolphins, and vehicles at its disposal. The boys often wear the same schoolboy shorts as that guy from AC/DC and the tight-fitting swimsuits that mothers put their children in when the little ones are too young to care. They have their own line of running shoes and their pre-adventure exercises are basically over-excited toe touches. And, oh yes, the boys play in the bath tub, in a manner of speaking.
The problem is, the boys are all in their forties and fifties, their equipment has gotten pretty junky, wives are divorcing, the money’s all gone, the dolphins don’t listen anymore, and they never really knew what they were doing in the first place. As Zissou and his men constantly haggle over funding, I thought of SF author Brian Aldiss’s theory that fantasy novels are successful among adolescents because no one in them is ever concerned with money.
The set-up is that Steve Zissou, a Jacques Costeau-esque pop oceanographer, has fallen on hard times. For about ten years. His documentary movies are no longer successful, his fan club is dwindling, and his wife (Angelica Huston) is fed up with him. She is even toying with going back to her first husband, a more successful oceanographer (a very Goldblumy Jeff Goldblum). Oh yes, and Zissou’s best friend and longtime colleague (Seymour Cassell) has just been bitten in half by a never-before-seen aquatic menace. Zissou calls it a “jaguar shark” because those are the first two words that came to mind when it was coming straight at him. On top of all this, a handsome young man named Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson) has appeared, claiming to be Zissou’s son. He wants to go with Zissou on his trip to avenge his dead friend by exterminating that damned jaguar shark. Probably with dynamite.
I will not reveal what happens on Zissou’s seafaring quest to dynamite the jaguar shark. Their only guides are the children’s books on oceanography that Zissou himself published over the decades. Without his wife-slash-mother figure—whom he admits knows all the science-y stuff and the Latin names for everything—Zissou is kind of lost. I will mention that he is joined by two unwanted guests, a reporter (Cate Blanchett) and an insurance company stooge (Bud Cort). Both of them are pure Wes Anderson creatures. Blanchett’s gum-smacking, pregnant, and constantly-staring reporter is a former childhood fan of Zissou’s, and might be out to destroy him. Both Zissou and Ned begin eyeing her. Cort’s bald, pudgy stooge is at first wary of the whole enterprise, then he begins to warm up to the “gee whiz!” fun of the aquatic life.
Page two of "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou." Back to home.