Review: "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou"

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Starring Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Cate Blanchett
Written by Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson
Directed by Wes Anderson

3.5 stars (out of 4)

It’s been too long. Too long, I say, since Wes Anderson released a film and gave us another gift to treasure as we stumble through the long cold nights of an era when almost anything is considered comedy. Anderson’s first three films were reliably brilliant, and he doesn’t disappoint with his fourth, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Indeed, The Life Aquatic may be the closest Anderson has yet come to telling the compassionate, wandering, subtle story of absurd characters doing brave things in bizarre circumstances that has lurked behind each of his films. Bottle Rocket (1996), amazing as it is, made more sense after the release of Rushmore (1998); the two points began to form a meaningful line, one bravely continued in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). Tenenbaums, with its larger cast and sprawling scope, was a gamble that barely paid off, almost groaning in some scenes under the weight of its own self-aware quirkiness and casting coups. But like Dignan and Max Fischer before him, Royal was able to stumble upon the truth of grace, acceptance and growing up. Dim-witted thief Dignan proclaimed, “They’ll never catch me. I’m f***ing innocent,” before his eventual capture and incarceration. Max, after finding and losing his first ideal love, said, “I didn’t get hurt that bad.” And Royal confessed to ex-wife Etheline concerning her new love interest, “Now I get it. He’s everything I’m not. I love you....” Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) comes to a similar moment in his own life, although how he gets there wonderfully pushes the envelope of Anderson’s mainstream storytelling and presents us with a film that must be viewed more than once to soak up the emotion of the characters and the depth of Anderson’s obvious joy that has permeated every frame, cut and spoken word. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is a phenomenal modern comedy, one worthy of Anderson’s name and talent and one we’ll be enjoying for years.

Steve Zissou is the latest in Anderson’s line of aimless wanderers, an often callous oceanographer running a ship (the Belafonte) and crew desperately in need of repair. At a gala screening of his latest documentary feature, Steve meets Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), a pilot from Kentucky with a cartoonish accent who claims to be Steve’s son from a long-ago tryst. Ned agrees to join Team Zissou aboard a ship already more crowded than normal with interns from the University of Alaska, reporter Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett), and “bond company stooge” Bill (Bud Cort) who’s keeping track of the money. Steve and Co. are ostensibly out to capture and kill a giant jaguar shark responsible for killing Steve’s old crewmate Esteban (Seymour Cassel), but this is just an excuse to get the Belafonte out to sea and let the Andersonian quirks run wild. Cassel, like Murray, has been in Anderson’s last three films, and Wilson has been in all four. Sadly missing here are Kumar Pallana and Andrew Wilson (brother to Owen and Luke), who each played substantial roles in Anderson’s first three films.

First mate Klaus (Willem Dafoe) feels underused and overlooked, but his adulation of Steve knows no bounds. Confronting an unhappy crew at one point, Steve draws a line on the deck and gives fairly vague instructions about whether his supporters should cross the line or stay back. Klaus proudly crosses the line in support, only to realize from Steve’s hurt and confused look that he might have accidentally betrayed him, at which point Klaus asks Steve to start over so he can do it right. Trust me, it’s funnier than it reads. Dafoe entertains throughout with an amazing sense of comedic timing and startling commitment to playing second fiddle. Each crew member wears a red wool cap, but only Klaus’s has a dangling ball; I don’t know if there’s any significance to this other than Anderson wanting to give Willem Dafoe a slightly fancier hat, but it’s a nice touch representative of Anderson’s fantastic attention to detail when crafting a world so similar to, yet fundamentally different from, our own.

Wilson has called Aquatic the oddest thing Anderson has done so far, and it’s hard to disagree. Even a story of mentally unstable low-level criminals looks balanced next to the tale of an oceanographer who, while out for revenge against the shark that killed his best friend, has a run-in with pirates and must rescue a member of his crew, meets a man who might be his son, and discovers a new breed of animal altogether. Pieces of The Royal Tenenbaums and almost all of The Life Aquatic feel like plays dreamed up and performed by the Max Fischer Players. The former featured a 375th Street YMCA and Gypsy cabs in a New York via Neverland, and there are scenes in the latter of such absurd heroism and sharp humor they could only come from the mind of the child prodigy who got into private school by writing a “little one-act about Watergate.” Computer effects, an Anderson first, are used in The Life Aquatic to breathe life into colorful, bizarre specimens that could only exist in the world of the Baumer. In one scene, Ned and Steve argue as they wind their way through the boat, no longer the actual boat but a cross-section used earlier as Steve narrates a guide to the ship. They enter and exit through half doors and hallways, winding their way up in one continuous tracking shot so graceful it disappears into the mise-en-scene and keeps the focus on the story. I was reminded of the tracking shot that closed out Tenenbaums: everyone standing in the street by the fire truck, each reconciling their own relationships as the camera never cut away. Additionally, when guns are fired in The Life Aquatic, they don’t blaze with the thunder of your typical Bruckheimerian pistol, but pop like, well, the props used by actors in Max’s “Heaven and Hell.” And this is Anderson: telling a story by telling a story.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou isn’t my favorite Wes Anderson movie; that place is held in my heart by Rushmore, and has been for years. But Anderson demonstrates in The Life Aquatic, absurdity and all, the warmth and honesty that made me care about Max Fischer in the first place, and he does so with enough passion and clarity to assure us he’ll be making movies for quite a while. I can hardly wait.