Movie Review - The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, from eccentric writer/director Wes Anderson, never completely sinks, but for the first time in his career, Anderson seems to have put his creative steamship on autopilot. As his body of work, beginning with 1996’s lovably lost Bottle Rocket through 1998’s academic oddball Rushmore and 2001’s family jewel The Royal Tenenbaums, has gradually gained cohesion and complexity, the sloppy ponderousness of The Life Aquatic reveals an ambitious talent in desperate need of a better editor.

On paper, the film’s narrative structure sounds like the most straightforward Anderson (with new writing partner Noah Baumbach) has ever composed. The story begins as the revenge fantasy of the titular oceanographic filmmaker (Bill Murray), whose grief over his closest comrade’s death at the hands of the elusive jaguar shark has spurred a crowded but lonely journey to snare his friend’s marine murderer. Announcing his quest to a roomful of shocked patrons, he is asked, “What would be the scientific purpose of killing it?” to which he replies, in perhaps the best example of the film’s deadpan humor, “Revenge.”

But almost immediately, the central storyline is shoved out by a series of subplots that meander in and out of the movie’s consciousness, rarely gaining enough thematic momentum or significance to justify their existences. A rivalry with fellow oceanographer Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum) offers a handful of barbed laughs, but ultimately devolves into plot-driving filler. Utterly superfluous segments about the expedition’s financial woes cheekily squander the ample talents of actor Michael Gambon (Gosford Park). To decry an Anderson film for its sideline prattling may be missing the point, but where seemingly nonsensical scenes might have served to amplify Zissou’s tragic failings or better explain his often whimsical actions, they instead pack the film with tedious dialogue.

While Anderson’s previous scripts were rich enough that his quirky characterizations did most of the developmental legwork for the performances, The Life Aquatic seems all too willing to use its actors as ottomans. Even within the mammoth ensemble in The Royal Tenenbaums, each character is given room to breathe, stretch and shake; heck, even the family’s butler Pagoda taps an emotional nerve as he stabs deceptive employer Royal Tenenbaum in the stomach, then loyally drags him to safety. But multi-dimensional characters are nowhere to be found aboard the cramped Life Aquatic, where the equivalent manservant role of Klaus Daimler is played with one-note efficiency by Willem Dafoe. Owen Wilson (as Zissou’s alleged illegitimate offspring) and Anjelica Huston (as Zissou’s dedicated wife) play their roles with such maddeningly detached insincerity that even their supposedly emotive scenes are one thin ironic line away from bad line readings at community theater auditions.

Of course, the film puts the heaviest weight on Murray, and the actor is never quite invested enough in the performance to support it. In creating Zissou, Murray cleanly cuts out the weary heartache of Lost in Translation’s Bob Harris to offer a shell of a man too sterile and smarmy to lend any real gravitas to Zissou’s gradual realization of his own mid-life impotence.

The film does offer some savory situational comedy (particularly when a gang of pirates invades the crew’s ship) and the soundtrack—largely composed of Seu Jorge’s soulful Portuguese reworkings of Bowie classics—is one of the year’s best. The set design on the ship is truly stunning, and a pair of scenes that capture the bustle on board while panning across a cross-section of the entire ship are jaw-dropping in their brazen gaudiness. But, as The Life Aquatic ends with Anderson’s trademark last-call denouement, where each character closes shop with a sharp one-liner, the viewer is reminded that Anderson has sailed this course before, but never without his characters’ humanity as an anchor.