'The Life Aquatic,' with Bill Murray, is a dippy plunge into oceanography
In Wes Anderson's Rushmore, Max Fischer, the multitasking renaissance boy played by Jason Schwartzman, mounts several preposterously ambitious school productions. There is a dramatization of Serpico, full of terse cop-speak, and an Apocalypse Now-influenced Vietnam War saga, replete with exploding ammo, whirring helicopters and heroic sacrifice. The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, Anderson's latest and most fanciful endeavor, comes across like an extended theatrical piece by the Max Fischer Players. Starring Bill Murray (Schwartzman's middle-aged, mopey foil in Rushmore), the film is full of flatly delivered discourse and elaborately detailed sets and props. The characters, to a man - and woman - represent eccentric turns on stock types. There's even a piracy-on-the-high-seas shootout, with bullets flying, bodies falling, and freak-outs on the poop deck.
In Wes Anderson's Rushmore, Max Fischer, the multitasking renaissance boy played by Jason Schwartzman, mounts several preposterously ambitious school productions. There is a dramatization of Serpico, full of terse cop-speak, and an Apocalypse Now-influenced Vietnam War saga, replete with exploding ammo, whirring helicopters and heroic sacrifice.
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, Anderson's latest and most fanciful endeavor, comes across like an extended theatrical piece by the Max Fischer Players. Starring Bill Murray (Schwartzman's middle-aged, mopey foil in Rushmore), the film is full of flatly delivered discourse and elaborately detailed sets and props. The characters, to a man - and woman - represent eccentric turns on stock types. There's even a piracy-on-the-high-seas shootout, with bullets flying, bodies falling, and freak-outs on the poop deck.
As Steve Zissou, a world-weary oceanographer and nature film producer (think Jacques Cousteau, only American, not French - rumpled, not dapper), Murray moons around in the simultaneous throes of self-doubt and self-absorption. He's often seen sporting a Team Zissou wetsuit, an outfit that makes it hard to take the guy seriously, even as he takes himself terribly so.
As Life Aquatic begins, Zissou is screening his latest oceanographic documentary to an unenthusiastic audience. The crowd perks up a bit when it becomes evident that Zissou's old friend and colleague isn't going to reemerge from the depths: Zissou reports that he's been eaten - the victim of a deadly "jaguar shark."
And Zissou, against everything he stands for, vows that he will hunt down this mysterious killer fish and avenge his colleague's death. As Moby Dick was to Ahab, the jaguar shark is to Zissou.
Joining the expedition aboard Zissou's ship, the Belafonte, along with the regular crew (Willem Dafoe as an eager-to-please German engineer, and Seu Jorge as a guitar-strumming deckhand) are a very British, very pregnant journalist (a really pregnant Cate Blanchett, raising gum-chewing to an art form) and a young airline pilot (Owen Wilson) who may or may not be the illegitimate son of Captain Zissou.
Bud Cort, who starred, long ago, in Harold and Maude - a film that's clearly had an influence on Anderson - also signs on, playing a numbers-crunching "bond-company stooge." And Anjelica Huston, looking wise and winsome, appears as Zissou's wife, supplying counsel and criticism, puffing on cigarettes all the while. She also supplies considerable heartache, as it appears she's rekindled a relationship with Zissou's arch-rival in the underwater exploration game: the smirking Alistair Hennessey (the smirking Jeff Goldblum).
Like Rushmore and Anderson's follow-up, The Royal Tenenbaums, much of the stuff of Life Aquatic has to do with the relationship between father and son, or father figure and son figure; it's laden with longing, with questions, with apology, with blame. Ned Plimpton (Wilson) flies for Air Kentucky (he's got the uniform to prove it); as a lad, his hero was Zissou. He proudly declares that he's been a member of the Zissou Society since he was 11.
The captain escorts his maybe-son on a tour of the Belafonte - a revamped sub-hunter that the audience sees in splendid, widescreen cross-section view. (Constructed on the fabled Cinecitta Studio lot in Rome, the boat interiors are a network of multilevel, dollhouse-like rooms - a lab, a kitchen, an editing and recording suite, a research library, an observation bubble.) After a stroll around the ship, and a revelatory beachside moment, Ned decides to trade in his Air Kentucky hat for a bright-red Team Zissou wool cap.
The Life Aquatic doesn't have the charged-up loopiness of Bottle Rocket (Anderson's first picture) or Rushmore, and Murray - as sublime as he is - is so transcendentally deadpan and melancholic that the performance feels theatrical and remote. In another context, this might not be a good thing. But Life Aquatic is all about remoteness (and about "theater"), so it works. The Life Aquatic is full of moments of strange tranquility and screwball juxtaposition. Like the old and creaky Belafonte, the film itself seems forever on the brink of drifting away. But it's the kind of drifting that's nothing but enjoyable. In fact, it's beyond enjoyable - heading into waters full of whimsy, mystery and odd, psychedelic fish.
Contact movie critic Steven Rea at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com.
Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/stevenrea.
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou *** 1/2 (out of four stars)
Produced by Wes Anderson, Barry Mendel and Scott Rudin, directed by Anderson, written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach, photography by Robert Yeoman, music by Mark Mothersbaugh, distributed by Touchstone Pictures.
Running time: 1 hour, 58 mins.
Steve Zissou. . . Bill Murray
Ned Plimpton. . . Owen Wilson
Jane Winslett-Richardson. . . Cate Blanchett
Eleanor Zissou. . . Anjelica Huston
Klaus Daimler. . . Willem Dafoe
Parent's guide: R (nudity, profanity, violence, adult themes)
Playing at: area theaters (opens Saturday)