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Written and directed by Wes Anderson; starring Bill Murray, Anjelica Huston, Cate Blanchett, Owen Wilson. Released to DVD on May 10, 2005.  About a year ago, I took refuge in a Manhattan art gallery to avoid the heavy rain falling outside. After wiping the water droplets from my forehead, I noticed that the featured exhibit in said gallery was a series of paintings that, to my inexperienced eye, looked liked an assortment of blue, red, green, yellow and other brightly colored canvasses. When I asked the docent about the exhibit, I learned that I was indeed correct. The artist in question had taken an incredibly small brush and had attacked an incredibly large canvas to ultimately create a unique texture to the uniformly colored four by four canvas. After more conversation with the docent, I came to understand that the singularly colored works in question were well-received by the critics, popular among the art world circles and were selling well to boot. It wasn’t until I learned of the largest paintings five digit price tag that something snapped in my head and I began to question why in the world people would purchase square paintings of primary colors. Somewhere in the middle of writer/director Wes Anderson’s fourth feature, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, I began thinking back to my experience in the Manhattan art gallery that was selling uniformly colored canvasses for $10,000. After more thought, I realized that both men, Anderson and the one colored artist, are wondrously capable craftsmen who are strangely and unfortunately limited in scope to an extremely focused swatch of art; what they do, they do incredibly well, but they are not able to do much else outside of that minute spotlight. Much like Anderson’s previous two films, Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is a charming character study of a group of very eccentric people (the kind marketing departments like to label ‘quirky’) who are all entertaining in their own unique brands of misery. Bill Murray stars in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou as Steve Zissou, a street-smart oceanographer who makes documentary films about his exploits, much like the late Jacques Costeau. Unlike Costeau though, Zissou is a complete mess of a human being. A very likeable complete mess of a human being, but a terrifically troubled man nonetheless. He smokes, he flirts with pregnant women, he has a number of ex-wives and his latest obsession is to find and kill the rare jaguar shark that ate his best friend at the end of his last documentary. Thrown into the Team Zissou mix are Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), a man who may be Zissou’s long lost son, Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett), a reporter with mysterious motivations and Klaus Daimler (Willem Dafoe), Zissou’s strangely sensitive, right-hand man.  Anderson has a very original and different style of direction that, rather naturally, inhabits all of his films. While certain directors strive hard not to be noticed–they just want to tell their story and be done with it–it is virtually impossible not to recognize the man behind the camera as Anderson injects his style and sensibilities into almost every shot in the movie. Anderson works in a world of straight lines and squares–angles other than 90 and 180 degrees are rarely seen on-screen. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach to filmmaking, or Anderson’s tendency to shoot most of his subjects straight on (if you don’t see the actor’s entire face, you’re most likely getting a complete profile), its just that the results of this method of filming are extremely dry. A director’s job is multi-faceted: not only is he responsible for telling the film’s story, but he is also responsible for creating an atmosphere of intrigue and for pacing the material appropriately. As I have mentioned numerous times before, critics and cinephiles growl the name ‘Michael Bay’ under their breath as though to speak it loudly would cause more bombast and car chases to spawn in Hollywood. Bay represents the epitome of the Hollywood evil, complete with spiraling cameras, gratuitous usage of crane shots and dialogue if his characters aren’t embroiled in some kind of gun battle. With this in mind, Anderson is the anti-Bay. I’d go so far as to argue that much of Anderson’s off-the-wall appeal and status as a critical darling has stemmed directly from the fact that he doesn’t instill films with any kind of standard atmosphere or pace. They are slow to unfold, they are decidedly non-glamorous, there are no true climactic events and, above all, the camera work is incredibly simple. Unfortunately, the presence of these traits in his repertoire caught up to Anderson on The Life Aqautic with Steve Zissou, sizably diminishing the returns that could have been had; with the proper amount of flair and exuberance, The Life Aqautic with Steve Zissou could have been a classic for the ages, Anderson’s new Rushmore. The material in The Life Aqautic with Steve Zissou is funny–the trailer is laugh out loud hysterical–but the movie itself would have been even funnier had Anderson peppered the film with just a few normal conventions and a little more energy; a different style of editing perhaps. However, herein lies the rub: I don’t think Anderson wants his films to be overtly anything, be it good, humorous, dramatic or entertaining. He seems quite happy continuing to complete these extremely subtle pictures and delivering them to the American public, whether they can empathize with the characters and their plights or not.  Murray is outstanding in the lead of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, as is the rest of the cast. I enjoyed this movie because of and almost entirely thanks to their on-screen efforts. Anderson’s patented style of direction works well for his smaller subject matter, but didn’t seem to mesh well with this gregarious, outlandish and larger scale character-driven action film. As it stands, this film was good enough to make me angry that it wasn’t better, but not poor enough to whole-heartedly rail against. If it weren’t a complete contradiction, I’d argue that the best description I could give to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is that of a truly successful failure.
chris neumer yes, it's true: Cate Blanchett was actually pregnant while playing the part of her character, the five months pregnant Jane Winslett-Richardson. |
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