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THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU
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Watching The Life Aquatic, one imagines young Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums), head propped on fists supported by rugburned elbows, mouth slightly agape as the bright swirls of a brand-new color television flicker across his wide eyes at the documentary adventures of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. For it is Cousteau's Kalypso (renamed the Belafonte, get it?) that serves as inspiration for the setting of Cousteau-like Captain Steve Zissou (Bill Murray, Lost in Translation) and his quest to hunt and down kill -- with dynamite -- the jaguar shark that ate his friend and chief diver Esteban.
Revenge consumes Zissou -- revenge against the leviathan shark, and revenge against smoothly smug competing oceanographer Alistair Hennessy (Jeff Goldblum, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension), who has usurped the best funding, and who once besotted and bedded Zissou's estranged wife Eleanor (Anjelica Huston, The Dead, looking ghastly).
As with other Anderson movies (Rushmore, Royal Tenenbaums), absent or failing fatherhood is the manifest theme of Life Aquatic. This is personified first by Air Kentucky pilot Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson, Starsky and Hutch), who materializes as Zissou's long-suspected, never-acknowledged son Kingsley, then second by the unborn baby carried by plucky inquisitive journalist Jane Winslett-Richardson (get the names? Cate Blanchett, Oscar and Lucinda), doing a feature article on Zissou and quite possibly planning it as a hatchet job.
However uneven his storytelling (effective in Rushmore, labored in Royal Tenebaums), director Anderson is owed a huge debt by Murray, whose career he single-handedly rescued by tapping Murray's ability to convey tired pain inside minimalist irony, with small soliloquies like this:
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go on an overnight drunk, and in ten days I'm going to set out to find the shark that ate my friend and destroy it. Anyone who wants to tag along is more than welcome.
Director Anderson is so in love with the improbable, the outré, and the distantly absurd that when he fails, he descends into solipsistic narcissism as tasteless as marzipan overload -- but here, improbably, he keeps to his course, if only because Zissou is (by his actions if not always by his manner) obsessed with the shark. Ahab in a red wool hat and a Speedo, he will steal property, take foolish chances, fight pirates, and sacrifice everything for what may be in fact a phantom:
Alistair: Jaguar shark! So tell me -- does it really exist?
Zissou [Hesitating]: You know, Allie, I don't want to give away the ending.
That bit of extra self-consciousness is justified (in story terms) because Zissou's entire expeditions are documentaries, all filmed by cameraman Vikram, and everyone onboard is so thoroughly conscious of the camera and the eventual film whose sales fund their voyages that even in crisis, Klaus Daimler (Willem Defoe, The English Patient) turns to the camera to shout, "Steve! They say you've got crazy-eye!"
An artsy director attracts talented actors like sparking neon on a humid summer night, and beyond the main cast we have among others Michael Gambon (The Singing Detective), Bud Cort (Harold and Maude), and Noah Taylor (Tomb Raider, Lara Croft), all of whom bring distinctive if implausible supporting characters.
But in the end, the film reaches its emotional and metaphoric moment when they are all bundled into the Belafonte's exploratory sub (courtesy of Peter Max and the Beatles), navigating the depths. Jane Winslett-Richardson hesitantly asks, "Are we -- are we safe in here?" and director-surrogate Zissou replies unconcernedly, without ever taking his upturned wide intense eyes from the multicolored glow before him:
"I doubt it."