Film
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
- Director
- Wes Anderson
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 119 mins
Insomuch as there’s a theme to Texan director Wes Anderson’s increasingly wry and stylised oeuvre, it is of the wilful, tactless, unreliable father and his dysfunctional brood. The Royal Tenenbaums cast a magnificent Gene Hackman in the role. Here Bill Murray, very much at the top of his game, proves an inspired choice as washed-up, Cousteau-esque celebrity oceanographer Steve Zissou, whose uniformed surrogate family Team Zissou are joined aboard the rickety yet fabulously equipped Belafonte by eager young Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), who has reason to believe he may be Zissou’s illegitimate son. Those who were turned off by Anderson’s drollery, precision widescreen framing and richly detailed production design in Tenenbaums should probably give Life Aquatic a wide berth, as it ramps up his distinctive style to new levels of surrealism. Everyone else should dive right in. The water’s lovely.
After Zissou’s best mate is eaten by a jaguar shark (all the film’s non-existent beautiful creatures are stop-motion creations of The Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick), he outrages the scientific establishment by announcing that his next mission will be to track and kill the beast. With dynamite if necessary. Trouble is, his cheesy aquatic documentaries are looking increasingly dated, and wife Eleanor (a glacial Anjelica Huston) – the brains and, more importantly, money behind Team Zissou – is leaving him for a smarmy “partly gay” rival ( Jeff Goldblum). Also complicating matters is a plummy, pregnant English hackette (Cate Blanchett), who’s been commissioned to write a feature on the expedition and arouses the ardour of both Steve and Ned.
The humour veers from broadly comic (a couple of ridiculous shootouts with pirates) to moments of great pathos, Anderson’s wilder flights of fancy being anchored by Murray’s ultimately rather touching performance as the absurd, poker-faced Zissou, whose monster-slaying mission leads inexorably to himself. He also gets all the best dialogue (To Eleanor: “I’m sorry. I haven’t been at my best this last decade.” To Ned, explaining why he never got in touch: “I hate fathers and I never wanted to be one.”). And did I mention the acoustic versions of early Bowie classics performed in Portuguese? Rarely has Life on Mars been so aptly used. Strap yourself in for a truly fantastic voyage.
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