Brilliant Bits Keep Life Aquatic Afloat

Wes Anderson is one of the best, most eccentrically original writer/directors working in American film today. Starting with Bottle Rocket and continuing through Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, he and writing partner Owen Wilson crafted some of the most distinct, witty and flavorful comedies of the last decade. Now comes Anderson’s fourth film, this time co-authored by Kicking and Screaming creator Noah Baumbach, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. A strangely surreal slice of undersea adventure and landlubber eccentricity, this is by far Anderson’s most ambitious project to date.

It’s also his most difficult to go along with. The Life Aquatic cuts just as many ties of emotional attachment as it creates, crisscrossing from start to finish alternating between alienating and embracing the audience. Anderson and Baumbach have crafted a world like no other, asking viewers to just sit back and accept all of the weird, deadpan whimsy and esoteric lyricism surrounding them. It’s not an easy thing to do, much of the film is off-putting and too deranged even for my slightly off-center tastes. In the end, I didn’t really so much care about Team Zissou and their adventures but rather admired the filmmaking skill needed to bring said adventures to the screen.

Upping for his third go-around with Anderson is the wondrous Bill Murray, commanding the picture as the iconic laconic Captain Steve Zissou. An underwater filmmaker with a penchant for the absurd, the undersea biologist’s latest is met with less-than-stellar acclaim. The first installment of a two-part epic, Zissou is intent on scrounging together the funds to finish his movie while at the same time doing his darndest to deal with an irritating midlife crisis peskily breaking up his daily routine. Topping things off, a mysterious Air Kentucky pilot named Ned Plimpton (Wilson) has shown up in Italy claiming to be the Captain’s long-lost and illegitimate son.

The brains behind Team Zissou, and Steve’s wife, Eleanor (Angelica Houston) scoffs at this idea, but she lets her husband carry on with his delusions of fatherhood anyway. Just as long as he’s nice to pregnant reporter Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett, using a breathy, squeak-ridden accent that truly must be heard to be believed), sent by her magazine to cover the erstwhile oceanographer for a cover story. But when Steve decides to bring Ned along on the latest voyage, Eleanor smells trouble and will not be a part of any more of her husband’s selfishness.

And what is the next adventure? It is a search for a fabled Jaguar Shark, a creature only Steve has claimed to see as it devoured friend and mentor Esteban du Plantier (Seymour Cassel) during the last outing. Now Steve is determined to take Team Zissou and his rickety boat The Belafonte into the heart of darkness as he single-mindedly chases this personal Moby Dick like a sarcastically deranged Ahab. His crew, including physicist/composer Vladimir (Noah Taylor), adoring German engineer Klaus (Willem Dafoe), company bond stooge Bill (Bud Cort) and topless script girl Marie (Robyn Cohen), join him on this crusade, blindly following their Captain for no other apparent reason than there’s nothing better to do.

This is a strangely beguiling mess of a movie, too be sure, and Anderson and Baumbach continually push events and proceedings to ever-increasing degrees almost as if they are trying to estrange as much of the audience as possible. Personally, as one who thinks both Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums are two of the best American comedies of the past decade, even I found myself scratching my head over this, alternating between loving, hating and sitting in the theater in dumbfounded disbelief as to where things were going. It’s all played in the same arch, richly sarcastic style of Anderson’s other features, but it’s dialed up to a higher frequency making things very, very difficult to relate or latch on to. It’s clear you have to get into this right away, and as much as I usually go for this sort of thing that simply wasn’t the case this time around.

And yet, there is so much brilliance to be found in The Life Aquatic I can’t remotely dismiss it. Murray and Houston were born to play characters in an Anderson film, the duo having a chemistry that blossoms so far beyond their dialogue its almost poetry. Then there is a daring, bravura tour through the Belafonte with Murray and Wilson that’s simply beyond reproach. A rather benign scene seemingly only existing to set the ship up as a character, it ends with a thunderclap of a coda as Murray comes clean with a half-hearted might-be truth to the man who could be his son. Best of the bunch, a bizarre island rescue of the company bond stooge from Malaysian pirates that’s so karmically violent and preposterously comedic it seems to spring from nowhere. It’s an inspired, insanely obtuse sequence and through the whole kinetic thing I just couldn’t stop myself from giggling in wondrous disbelief.

I could go on and on. From a hot air balloon ride between Steve and Jane to the raiding of richly funded rival oceanographer Alistair Hennessey’s (Jeff Goldblum) underwater lair to a series of David Bowie songs delicately sung in Portuguese by Team Zissou’s safety expert Pelé dos Santos (Seu Jorge) to the sublime underwater creatures created by maverick stop-motion maestro Henry Selick (Tim Burton’s the Nightmare Before Christmas), there’s so much here to love it makes your head spin. This is easily one of the most original creations to grace cinema screens in some time, and for that very fact alone Anderson and company should be roundly applauded.

But not embraced. The Life Aquatic doesn’t work as a whole, and no amount of visual splendor or wry comedy can change that. It isn’t that Anderson and Baumbach have gone to far; it’s just that they’ve forgotten to bring their audience along for the ride, overlooking that their own eccentric fantasies by themselves might not be enough for the rest of us to care about. In the end, I don’t really know what to make of all of it other than to admire the attempt, love the bits and pieces, and try like crazy to forget the whole.

Film Rating: êê1/2  (out of 4)