Yellowy Submarine

THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU

DIRECTED BY WES ANDERSON

COMBINING A POP-CULTURE echo chamber and Oedipal fun house, the mind of Wes Anderson is fixated on adolescent nostalgia. That's his charm. It's a vision that also strikes chords of longing that resonate in the now-complicated parts of your adulthood. That's his depth. Because Anderson can put this paradox on the screen—with funny characters, irresistible music and ebullient images—he stands as the most playful and poignant of the American Eccentrics. His flamboyantly titled new film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou beats this year's good work by Alexander Payne (Sideways) and David O. Russell (I Heart Huckabees) for sheer effervescence. It is the most idiosyncratic, intimate and appealing of the bunch.

This is Anderson's big one—his 8 1/2 and his Moby Dick. The problems of power, fame, creative freedom and domestic upheaval that perplex celebrated filmmakers once they arrive at a place of eminence and choice are addressed through the career of Steve Zissou, an oceanographer-filmmaker (played by Bill Murray). The Eccentrics don't like to admit their privilege; it's part of the middle-class advantage most filmmakers enjoy. But that awareness saturates every opulent, comic frame of The Life Aquatic. Anderson doesn't take privilege for granted; he basks in it, scrutinizes it.

Steve Zissou is introduced while being honored at a film festival in Italy where he showcases his most recent troubled footage. Still heady with arrogance, he also mourns the loss of a longtime friend and shipmate, Esteban (Seymour Cassel), who was killed during that film/shark-hunting expedition. Facing down celebrity, loss and the derision of a few skeptics (a couple gossips, "Look at him wearing that gay little earring!"), Zissou also juggles dependence on his levelheaded estranged wife Eleanor (Anjelica Huston) and other admiring, available women.

Anderson makes high life (Fellini's La Dolce Vita) tickling but strange. His movie has a wonderland aspect not so different from his previous films Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums but that is warmly suited to this film's semi-autobiographical perspective. Anderson conveys the guileless excitement of a young person amused that life is finally, actually happening to him. Zissou is anxious yet excited about rising to the occasion. This ornery adventurer is a quintessentially American pioneer. He has no negativity. Everything seems possible. The fact that his shipping-magnate rival Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum) is Eleanor's ex-husband is no problem; Hennessey announces, "I'm part gay," and Zissou shrugs "Supposedly everyone is." Just when Zissou wonders what his legacy might be, Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), a young Southern gentleman wearing an Air Kentucky pilot's uniform, presents an answer. He's been a charter member of the Zissou Society since childhood and is, very probably, Zissou's unclaimed son.

Zissou's new mission is to avenge his dead friend while resurrecting his reputation and salvaging his ragtag family, which includes another loyal deckhand Klaus Daimler (Willem Dafoe), a pregnant magazine writer, Jane Winslett-Richards (Cate Blanchett), who is doing his profile, an insurance bondsman, Bill Ubell (Bud Cort), and a crew of college students working as interns. With all these obligations, Zissou has to be physically and emotionally ambidextrous (like any filmmaker leading the troops). But Anderson isn't simply infatuated with the filmmaking process. He zeroes in on Zissou's career ambition while observing his spiritual yearning.

The Life Aquatic blends a world of make-believe into a world of serious consequences. It becomes a remarkable visualization of Anderson's mind when the behind-the-scenes experience of the American Eccentrics gets compressed into Zissou's one-of-a-kind dilemma. He maintains his vision and nears his goals according to how he conducts his humanity. It's the struggle of an artist to be human; of an aged youth struggling to be an adult (Confused, pregnant Jane worries, "I need to find a boy for this father." Zissou responds, "I know what you mean"). No one could play this predicament better than Bill Murray.

After the unaccountable acclaim for his dry, too-familiar turn in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation—and following his cameo in Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes, where GZA and the RZA christened him with the one-word monicker "Billmurray" to honor both his fame and his bonhomie—the veteran performer now turns in his most intricate and subtly humored film performance. Steve Zissou is the definitive American Eccentrics self-portrait—altogether spoiled, bad-mannered and chagrined. Murray is ideally paired opposite Goldblum, but Anderson (and co-writer Noah Baumbach) didn't provide enough interplay for the two slyest forwards in movies. Instead, he uses Murray to represent a more fatherly, grown-up boomer type. Zissou ponders, "What happened to me? Did I lose my talent? Am I ever gonna be good again?" These are old-man questions only privately dared by the other American Eccentrics. Anderson looks deeper than his peers (and poses his query more authentically and effectively than that other Anderson, Paul Thomas). When Zissou leads his crew onto the beach at Ping Island and finds only he is covered with swamp leeches, he asks, "No one got hit? Just me? What's the deal?" That last (existential) question is asked with light, wry incredulity. Billmurray! Billmurray!

The particular species of American Eccentric explored in The Life Aquatic represents the last few generations of affluent habit and dispensation—generations for whom degrees, trust funds and limitless opportunity come before responsibility. Yes, the oceanographer half of Steve Zissou is whimsically modeled on Jacques Cousteau (his ship the Calypso is named the Belafonte here); but Zissou's shark-hunting evokes Steven Spielberg, the ultimate figure of intrepid American filmmaking. All Anderson's film-loving contemporaries have had their imaginations touched by Spielberg, whether they admit or not. Filmmaking is their great voyage and their best work—Election, Three Kings, Being John Malkovich, O Brother, Where Art Thou?—partakes of Spielberg's cinematic zest and humanist zeal.

That partly explains why Anderson gave The Royal Tenenbaums an innocent storybook-quality narrative. But The Life Aquatic's structure seems more riskily intuitive; it's what critic Dennis Delrogh might term "unhinged." This time Anderson drops literariness and demonstrates a distinctly movie-bred sensibility. Showing off the Belafonte, Zissou presents the damnedest cross-section movie set since Jerry Lewis' The Ladies Man. His ship contains a science lab and movie studio complete with recording booth, editing suite and a pair of white dolphins with video cameras attached to their heads for undersea shots. Recalling Roman Coppola's wondrous, too-little-seen feature debut CQ (where Italy was also the locus of cinephilia), The Life Aquatic fuses generational movie-mania with wanderlust.

As Zissou sails the sea and mixes it up with pirates, his attempts to hold on to his loved ones are adventurous yet deadly serious. Anderson confronts life, realizing artistic dedication doesn't salvage the mess one makes, yet life stays awesome, movie-like. The storming of Ping Island with the ragtag crew approaching the dilapidated Hotel Citroen suggests the discovery of a ruined lost world—or a future to repair. Their lives are beyond Zissou's control, yet he's always heroically game, braving bullets and their own independence. When he sets his sights on Jane, Zissou warns fellow sea dog Klaus "Not this one"—the brotherly caution from Truffaut's Jules and Jim. Zissou witnesses a tryst between Jane and Ned in a brief yet intricate pov joke: His dolphin-cams catch the couple's kiss, then transmit the video to a monitor that Zissou watches through a portal.

Such poignant movie humor marks Anderson's visual style: widescreen, still-life compositions that suggest pomo fables. His method is all exposition but with diverse, detailed elements that are wholly original. Cinematographer Robert Yeoman catches unusual images such as an Arctic night in which a blue band curves upward across the bright sky. No representation of how natural phenomena (and its twin, pop culture) affects your sensibility is more contemporary than this. Devo's terrific space/surf/ice-rink intro to "Gut Feeling" finally makes it to the screen (how did Anderson know!) and he even enlisted Henry Selick to design fanciful sea creatures that amaze Team Zissou when huddled in their Beatlesque sub, a perfect image of friendship. Selick's figurine-like animation keeps proportion with Anderson's small-scale approach to wonder.

Throughout, Anderson embraces the disparate as in the Italian scenes that mix Romanesque columns and metal machinery—old and new, archeology and technology, the comfortable familiar and the disorienting unknown. It's part of that American eccentricity to obsess over growing up. Anderson's obsession has genuine, daffy substance. o