Of course, there was no shortage of freaks onboard the good ship “Belafonte” before the reporter and the stooge joined the crew. Zissou’s trusted right-hand is a half-crazed German named Klaus (the great and creepy Willem Dafoe), jealous perhaps to violence over the attention Zissou is giving his new-found son. “Why do you always put me on B squad and never with you on A squad?” Klaus moans. “But I always make you the leader of B squad,” Zissou explains.
Okay, maybe I’ll tell you a little more of what happens. The “Belafonte” breaks a lot, supplies have to be stolen from a different oceanography company, and there are pirates. Yes, pirates. If there has ever been an instance in a movie when I thought the main character was just dreaming or having a fantasy sequence, the pirate attack is it. It seems as if the filmmakers of “The Life Aquatic” decided to start making things up along the way, just like Zissou would. It’s great.
The genius of Murray’s ability to make Zissou sympathetic can’t be overstated. He smokes pot, he casually crowbars his way into other people’s cabins, he makes up rules and justifications like a four-year-old might (“you don’t have to be so mad at me, I just wanted to flirt with you.”) He is cavalier about using other people’s lives in his documentaries and explains it away not smugly or intellectually but with a defeatist, “who cares?” moaning and groaning. He never bothers to learn the names of the college interns aboard the ship and he has no compunctions about breaking into Jeff Goldblum’s sea lab. His explanation of “it’s the scientific community, man,” carries delightful echoes of “back off, man, I’m a scientist” from almost twenty years ago.
“The Life Aquatic” has several great locations, including Zissou’s rundown island getaway and the abandoned resort where the crew of the “Belafonte” trips and dynamites its way through a rescue. Best of all is the working cutaway of the entire ship, a life-sized version of what you might find spread across two pages of a boys’ book on battleships. The actors can move about freely even while we see into the rooms above and below them. “This is the observation tube,” Murray narrates blandly, “the design of which actually came to me in a dream.” The effects used to create the colorful undersea life are phony and cartoonish, which is appropriate, and there are a couple of gunbattles that are as clumsy and goofy as they are inspired. One involves Zissou running around in his speedo, firing a pistol wildly while neither he nor the pirates ten feet away from him can hit anything. Mostly the pirates seem confused.
I won’t try to guess what Anderson is up to. Maybe it’s simply a matter of creating a cavalcade of weirdoes and seeing how they’ll undo themselves. Maybe he has issues with his dad. All his films feature irredeemably crummy, yet strangely sympathetic fathers, who never quite grew up enough themselves to deserve children, and whose exotic escapes from familial responsibility have reached their zenith with the never-ending childhood of Steve Zissou. Who knows.
Finished Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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