Under the Sea
Now Playing: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (d. Wes Anderson)
Wes Anderson's films are often accused of keeping their ironic distance at the expense of emotion. His immaculately detailed frames and deadpan direction certainly aren't suited to the big emotional moments we are given to expect from Hollywood movies. I'd argue that Anderson's style (along with his preternatural adeptness selecting background music) perfectly conveys a range of emotions; just not the play-it-to-the-back-row bag of tricks we expect. Consider the sublime moment in Rushmore when Bill Murray's Herman Blume calmly drops off the diving board and sinks to the bottom of his swimming pool, cigarette still gripped in his mouth, seemingly oblivious to the choas of his boorish sons' birthday party all around him. Without a line of dialogue, we know everything about the emptiness of Blume's life and his desperation to escape. Or the scene in The Royal Tenenbaums, where Luke Wilson's Richie Tenenbaum, to the tune of Elliot Smith's haunting "Needle in the Hay," shaves off his long hair and beard under the clinical fluorescent glare of a bathroom fixture, and then, almost as an afterthought, slashes his wrists. It's a shocking moment, but it feels true precisely because Anderson hasn't let us get inside Richie's head. We know he's withdrawn and deeply disturbed, but the extent of his alienation doesn't become clear until then.

It is with some regret, then, that I must report that Anderson's latest, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, is perhaps the most emotionally barren of Anderson's films to date. It's got all the elements: a fantastic ensemble cast, an incredibly well-realized world (including a fantastic cutaway-view set of Zissou's ship, the Belafonte), deadpan line delivery, Seymour Cassel. But, except for a few isolated moments, we don't really connect with Bill Murray's Zissou, a self-centered middle aged Cousteau-like filmmaker who undertakes to find and kill the elusive Jaguar shark that ate his first mate, Esteban (Cassel) during the filming of Zissou's last underwater adventure. We're told that Zissou cared deeply for Esteban, but we're never given any reason why (other than the fact that he's played by Cassel---seriously, how can anyone not like that guy?), and given the way he mistreats everyone else in his sphere of influence, his love for his friend seems kind of fake. Zissou is a mightily flawed man and a grade-A sonofabitch, just like Gene Hackman's Royal Tenenbaum or Murray's Blume; unlike those characters, Anderson can't seem to find a way to make us feel for him despite ourselves.

Joining Zissou on his quest are a crew led by the creepily loyal Klaus Daimler (Willem Dafoe, sporting a weird German accent), a pregnant reporter (Cate Blanchett, luminous and sporting a bit of her Katherine Hepburn accent), a recently-introuced young man who may be Zissou's bastard son (Owen Wilson, mostly able to maintain a southern drawl), a Bond Company Stooge (Bud Cort), Zissou's wife (Anjelica Houston, doing her icy society matriarch thing), and a guy (Jorge Seu) whose only function seems to be providing scene transitions by way of singing David Bowie songs in Portuguese. Along the way, Zissou is daunted by his wife's former husband, the much more successful oceanographer Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum), Filipino pirates, and his own inability to accept his fatherly responsibilities, complicated by competition for the affections of the reporter. And that's just about it. All the elements are there, but they just don't add up to a fully satisfying whole.

And yet I feel I may be being too hard on the film due to Anderson's track record of consistent greatness. The Life Aquatic is thoroughly enjoyable in many ways---the quirky sense of humor, the performances of Murray and the rest of the cast, the minute details of the costumer and set designer. Some critics have argued that it's time for Anderson to move past the aesthetic of his past three films. There may be some truth to that; any artist's aesthetic must evolve or become stale. I don't think it's time for Anderson to move in an entirely new direction, however. His gift is the ability to conceive of entire self-contained worlds as they might appear in the thoughts of a precocious twelve year old and translate them faithfully to the screen. When his films work best, it's through the juxtaposition of adult problems with this whimsical worldview, as in Rushmore, when Max is exiled from the "green world" of Rushmore Academy and forced to attend public school; or the reverse in Tenenbaums, when the various members of the clan retreat to the fantasy world of their childhood home. The Life Aquatic's world is brilliantly conceived and executed, from Team Zissou's matching uniforms to the magnificent Henry Selick-designed animated fictional sea life, but there's nothing grounded in reality for us to grab on to--when the film's few emotional beats come, they seem forced, out of place.

I read much of the film as Anderson's reflections on the filmmaking process. Zissou struggles with the usual bugaboos: hostile film festival audiences, financing troubles, mutinous crews. Zissou is on the downside of his career, having lost whatever joy he presumably used to find in his work. Anderson's too crafty to include a nakedly autobiographical character, but it's possible that Zissou doesn't resonate as strongly with the audience because Anderson is already too close, unable to get the ironic distance his work requires. If anything, I hope Anderson sees The Life Aquatic as something of a cautionary tale and finds a way to avoid his title character's disillusionment with the art of making movies.