The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

"Because I hate fathers, and I never wanted to be one."

Wes Anderson's "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" is a truly beautiful failure of a film, one that makes you nod your head in sorrow asking how an artist could waste such an amazing visual sense on a such a lackluster script. Anderson certainly has a style to his films; most involve a failed father figure, pastel or faded colors, centering every scene in the middle of the lens, characters who hide deep anguish behind a smug almost shallow persona, and contrived worlds that seem to emanate straight from a picture book or novel. When held in the correct balance, audiences can be blessed with a film like "The Royal Tenenbaums," which beautifully coalesces all that is original in Anderson's work. But when the balance is off, Anderson produces a film like "The Life Aquatic," a movie that borders on annoying at times, if not tragic. Indeed, somewhere in the gorgeous canvas of this film lies the components of a much better film that dare not show its head above water.  

The movie's title role is aptly played by Bill Murray, whose sheer talent and charisma elevate the film to a bearable state. Steve Zissou is a Jacques Cousteau-like sea explorer who produces documentary films, which, as we find out, are more contrived than they appear to be. On his last production, Zissou and his best friend, Esteban, were attacked by huge, unknown shark-like creature, leaving Esteban dead and Zissou traumatized. In a fit of rage, Zissou plans to produce his last film in which he will hunt down the shark and kill it for revenge. The rest of the film is essentially a post modern retelling of Melville's "Moby Dick:" both Captain Ahab and Steve Zissou seek the giant whale (or shark) to not only kill it as revenge for an injury, but also to confront the cruel randomness of nature itself. If the movie has an emotional linchpin or a noticeable strongpoint, it is Zissou's heartfelt search for reasoning behind worldly suffering. 

The rest of the characters are annoyingly one-dimensional and cliche. The entire film seems like a series of hipster paper dolls with obvious self-explanation scurrying across a beautiful template. They might as well have labels and descriptions on their costumes. By far, the worst character and performance in the film belongs to Owen Wilson, who plays an anachronistic Southern airline pilot named Ned who materialized out of thin air from the 1850's. Not only is the presence of the character jarring and without reason, Wilson's amateur accent is enough to make you wince. Zissou has an intelligent wife played by Angelica Huston, whose performance confuses the contemplative for the comatose. Willem Defoe plays Klaus, whose only job in the film is to be an uber german for comic relief. Jeff Goldblum plays Captain Hennesey, Zissou's professional nemesis with only one defining trait: he is a closeted gay man. Cate Blanchett plays a recently impregnated reporter assigned to write about the aged Zissou. Then there's a guy simply known as the "bond company stooge." The list of non-people go on and on in this movie. 

The dialogue is guilty of the most severe transgression that an imbalanced Wes Anderson film can possess: an annoying, shallow preoccupation with itself to the point in which it becomes "too much" or "hyper-precious." I'm sure many of these non-sequitur lines seemed humorous or clever in the mind of Wes Anderson, but their utterance in the movie is often excruciating or at least frustrating. While I recognize Anderson as a notable artist, he really seemed to making this film for his own entertainment rather than ours. Because of this shallow dialogue, the audience invests little or no emotion or interest in the characters. They exist in the foreground without depth.

The film's sizable artistic contradiction comes in the fact that despite the poor script and characters, Anderson is able to create a world teeming with color, imagination, and inventiveness. Frankly, the production design is beautiful; in fact, it's kind of a masterpiece. From the little stop motion animated sea creatures to the choice of using David Bowie songs performed in Portuguese to connote otherworldliness, Anderson sure knows how to transport you into his creation. One of my favorite scenes is the one in which Zissou provides a tour of his ship, The Belafonte:

What is impressive about Anderson is his ability to create a complete world in his head and then reproduce it on film. All the little idiosyncratic rooms on his boat are little masterpieces in and of themselves. The level of detail in creating Zissou's world with paintings, books, imaginary animals and plants, even his blue uniforms and signature walkie-talkies are incredible. I really wish Anderson sense of visual detail corresponded to other parts of the film, notably the story and dialogue.

"The Life Aquatic" is another Anderson saga about a failed father figure. Esteban dies and orphans Zissou, while the latter is emotionally unable to fulfill his paternal role for "probably-his-son Ned." Whether they are about adding or subtracting a family member, relationships are painful for Zissou, By the end of the film, Zissou finds the jaguar shark and says, "I wonder if it remembers me?" and then sobs. This reaction is the main difference between Captain Ahab and Steve Zissou; the former lived in a religious world in which suffering was rationalized as part of God's plan while Zissou lives in a world in which cruel randomness must be accepted. The underwater submarine scene in which Zissou realizes that the natural world is both beautiful AND chaotic is one of the finest of the film.

Wes Anderson did achieve some great things in "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," but they were all conceptual and visual. After another visually stunning but empty movie, "The Darjeeling Limited," Anderson got his mojo back with "Moonrise Kingdom" and "The Grand Budapest Hotel," which found a balance between actual substance and his quirky sensibility. While my favorite Anderson film continues to be "Rushmore" and all of its angsty silliness, I have to say that "The Life Aquatic" is his most sublime. Too bad the movie failed to sound as good as it looked.