The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Bill Murray, Owen Wilson) no stars
One need only consider the depth of talent aboard the sunken film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou to automatically consider it an unmitigated nautical disaster. It's the cinematic equivalent of a horrific car crash, too ugly and deformed to be conceivable to our conditioned minds, and yet so rare a spectacle to behold that we have to keep looking directly at it, because we hope and pray for the best for its unsuspecting victims who have suffered. Alas, there is no relief to this dry, unimaginative movie, easily one of the worst of 2004 and destined to take down more than a few star's careers in the process.
The Life Aquatic is proof positive that Hollywood is willing to bankroll any project that falls under the scope of being "quirky" so long as it isn't likely to cost too much money to produce. This movie looks cheap because it is cheap. Cheap production values; cheap, hollow performances by the actors; a script devoid of any cohesive or comic merit; and, worst of all, a self-congratulatory tone of elitism that permeates all but a handful of its dry, tedious scenes. Those who sit through The Life Aquatic will only find themselves consistently being removed from its on-again/off-again neo-realism that condescends to the hapless viewer every step of the way. When I wasn't nodding off from boredom, I was clenching my fists in anger at its pretentious posturing.
In recapping the plot, it's hard to know where to begin, because ultimately it never goes anywhere anyway. Bill Murray is world-famous oceanographer Steve Zissou, a hapless captain who films then publicly screens his expeditions in order to continue to receive funding for his misadventures. When his first mate Esteban is eaten by what Zissou believes to be a jaguar shark, he goes all Captain Ahab on its hiney and sets his sights on uncharted waters that take he and his shipmates to the brink of high seas danger and back again. The result is post-modernism meets dark comedy meets Jacques Cousteau.
Zissou is re-united with his long lost son Ned (Owen Wilson), and although we are supposed to see some kind of father-son reconciliation come to fruition, the two characters are so lifelessly stapled to writer-director Wes Anderson's didactic screenplay that there is never an ounce of pathos to their scenes. Worse is the mish-mash of supporting players, who are given one-dimensional walk-ons that are downright embarrassing. You've got Cate Blanchett as a pregnant reporter prone to her spontaneous whore-mones, Michael Gambon as a philanthropic producer, Jeff Goldblum as a wealthy antagonistic bisexual, and Anjelica Houston as Zissou's unhappy, less-than-devoted wife. Only Willem Dafoe, sporting a truly imbecilic red cap, seems to be having any fun with his character as an eager German devotee. Everyone else onboard seems to have allowed Anderson to extract any semblance of their personalities with a cinematographic syringe.
If there had been one more of Anderson's framed, trademarked straight-on camera angles with the characters looking directly ahead, I'd have hollered. If there had been one more acoustic David Bowie song performed in Spanish by a character helpfully named Pelé (one of many stereotypes in the film that exist only to be stereotypes and nothing more), I'd have thrown something at the screen. And if there had been one more scene with each deadpan character wearing a blue wetsuit and wandering around looking for some kind of existential reason to "be", I'd have demanded my money back.
And yet despite this, I am still glad I went to see The Life Aquatic, because it is one of those rare films that movie lovers absolutely must see, on the off chance that they do in fact end up happening to actually like it. This is a picture made for people who have always wanted desperately to be in on a joke they don't quite understand, and who will force themselves to find humour and complexity in almost anything, even if it isn't actually there. The joke is on them, and perhaps on all of us; Anderson's masturbatory inclinations are sprawled out for all the world to see, and it would appear that it is he alone who is gratified when all is said and done.
