The Life Aquatic Review

In his brief career Wes Anderson has proven himself to be very much a love-him or hate-him director. There are those who find his highly stylized work off-putting but those who get him tend to get him pretty hard and amongst that crowd he’s had something of a charmed life with fans generally agreeing that he’s gotten better every time out. Thus, there was a huge amount of anticipation for his fourth film – The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou – as fans tried to figure out how he’d top his past efforts. The cast was in place with Anderson stalwarts Bill Murray and Owen Wilson in the leads and the trailers were enough to show that his unique visual sense was in full effect. But would that be enough? Sadly, no. There’s an awful lot to like about The Life Aquatic but not enough to love and it certainly goes down as the weakest Anderson film thus far.

Bill Murray stars as Steve Zissou a down on his luck oceanographer – a sub-par Jacques Cousteau – who is caught in a failing marriage to fellow Anderson alum Anjelica Houston, whose last few documentaries have failed thus leaving him without a distributor or financial backers, and whose best friend was eaten by a shark on his most recent exhibition. Once respected Zissou has become an object of ridicule and his only motivating force is the desire to track down the shark that killed his friend and kill it. And then he meets Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson) a young man from Kentucky who just may be Zissou’s son. Ned joins Zissou’s odd little crew, finances the shark hunt with insurance money from his mother’s recent death and off they go.

Anderson makes some key additions to his stock stable of actors with this film and they all pay off admirably. Willem Dafoe is perfect as the neurotic Klaus, never failing to draw a laugh from the audience; Jeff Goldblum turns up as Zissou’s main rival in both personal and professional circles; Cate Blanchett provides the emotional center of the film; and Bud Cort – best known for his role in the classic Harold and Maude – is brilliant in a too-small role as a financial watchdog. Anderson’s new creative partnership with stop motion animator Henry Selick – a partnership continuing with their joint adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox – also pays off large with Selick’s work perfectly complementing Anderson’s slightly skewed visuals.

So, with all of these pluses where’s the downside? Mostly it’s the script. It simply doesn’t feel finished. In previous Anderson films the quirkiness has always been balanced by a deeply rooted sense of humanity. The characters were odd, yes, but you always hade the sense that they were real, you were given enough to understand and empathize with them. This is not the case here. There’s just enough there to convince me that Anderson himself knows these people inside and out, that he has fully developed back stories for each of them laid out in his head, but not nearly enough of that detail makes it into the finished product. With a few exceptions – Blanchett being the most striking - the characters play as Anderson stock types. There’s a feeling that Anderson has swallowed his own tail here a little bit and gotten caught up in all the little quirks and tics that make a “Wes Anderson film” while forgetting that, at the end of the day, if the characters don’t click the film will ultimately fail. There’s a ton of good material here but not nearly enough of it has been drawn to the surface, a situation that likely could have been fixed via another draft or two’s worth of refining and tightening.

And then there’s the Bill Murray factor. It’s hard to say that Murray’s mailing it in if only because he’s playing a character who very definitely IS mailing it in, but the simple fact is that we’ve seen Murray play this exact character twice in recent days – Lost In Translation and Rushmore – and do it better both times. It’s not that Murray’s bad, it’s just that he’s been so much better and, again, there’s the sense that he’s eaten his own tail. There’s too much here that’s simply ‘Bill Murray goofing around with Wes Anderson’ and not enough actual story or character work. The soft script and performance combine to create a bit of an emotional vacuum. When Luke Wilson attempts suicide in The Royal Tennenbaums the audience felt it – there was a shocked gasp that ran through the room – but there’s no comparable emotional crescendo in The Life Aquatic. Anderson attempts one, yes, but it just doesn’t work because people haven’t been shown enough to really invest in the characters, to really care about what happens.

I’m being harsh here, yes, but that’s because I know Anderson is capable of better than this. From another film maker this would generate a cautiously positive review, but coming from Anderson and contrasted to his earlier work it is definitely sub-par. There are some fantastic individual performances, set pieces and visual gags but they never quite come together into a whole. The Life Aquatic is a pleasant enough diversion but that’s just not quite enough from a man who looked to be on his way to crafting a significant masterpiece.