BY
ROGER EBERT / Dec 24, 2004
My
rational mind informs me that this movie doesn't work. Yet
I hear a subversive whisper: Since it does so many other things,
does it have to work, too? Can't it just exist? "Terminal
whimsy," I called it on the TV show. Yes, but isn't that
better than half-hearted whimsy, or no whimsy at all? Wes
Anderson's "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou"
is the damnedest film. I can't recommend it, but I would not
for one second discourage you from seeing it.
To
begin with, it has a passage of eerie beauty, in which the
oceanographer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) and his shipmates
glide in a submarine past an undersea panorama of wondrous
and delightful creatures. They are seeking the dreaded jaguar
shark that ate Steve's beloved partner, and when they find
it, well, they fall silent and just regard it, because it's
kind of beautiful. This could have been a scene from "20,000
Leagues Under the Sea" if Captain Nemo had been a pothead.
Zissou
is, we learn, the auteur of a series of increasingly uneventful
undersea documentaries, in which the momentum is sliding down
a graph that will intersect in the foreseeable future with
a dead standstill. "The Life Aquatic" opens with
the premiere of his latest work, which ends with the audience
gazing up at the screen as if it is more interesting now that
it is blank. Zissou himself seems to be in the later stages
of entropy and may become one of those Oliver Sacks people
who just sit there on the stairs for decades, looking at you.
His crew would seem slack-witted to SpongeBob.
On
board the good ship Belafonte, Zissou has assembled his ex-wife
Eleanor (Anjelica Huston), her ex-husband Alistair (Jeff Goldblum),
the salty dog Klaus Daimler (Willem Dafoe), the plummy producer
Oseary Drakoulias (Michael Gambon), and the financial guy
Bill (Bud Cort, so that's what happened to him). Along the
way they collect Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), who thinks he
may be Steve's son, although my theory is he's just another
one of George Plimpton's unfinished projects. Their mission
is to find the deadly shark, exact revenge, and film the adventure.
Covering the expedition is Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate
Blanchett), whose surname suggests she is the result of an
affair involving the matriarchs of two great acting families
and a designated male, perhaps Ned's birth father.
These
characters involve themselves in great plot complications,
which are facilitated by the design of the boat, which looks
like a rust bucket on the outside but conceals innumerable
luxuries, including a spa. There is also a "scientific
laboratory" with lots of equipment that looks as if it
might have been bought at auction from a bankrupt high school
in 1955. Anderson has built a wonderful set with a cutaway
front wall so that we can look into all the rooms of the boat
at once; it's the same idea Jerry Lewis used in "The
Ladies' Man."
Events
on the boat are modulated at a volume somewhere between a
sigh and a ghostly exhalation. Steve Zissou is very tired.
I suggest for his epitaph: Life for him was but a dreary play;
he came, saw, dislik'd, and passed away. Ned makes an effort
to get to know his father, a task made difficult because Steve
may not be his father and is not knowable. Jane, Ned and Steve
form a romantic triangle, or perhaps it is just a triangle.
A folk singer performs the works of David Bowie in Portuguese,
and the ship is boarded by Filipino pirates.
So
you see, it's that kind of movie. The colors are like the
pastels produced by colored pencils, and kind of beautiful,
like the shark. The action goes through the motions of slapstick
at the velocity of dirge. Steve Zissou seems melancholy, as
if simultaneously depressed that life is passing him by, and
that it is taking so long to do it. Anjelica Huston seems
privately amused, which is so much more intriguing than seeming
publicly amused. Cate Blanchett proves she can do anything,
even things she should not do. I forgot to mention that Steve's
friend is played by Seymour Cassel, who I think I remember
told me one night in Dan Tana's that he had always wanted
to be eaten by a shark in a movie.
