A lot of people are really going to hate The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Some sad, possibly miserable, people are going to walk from the cinema bemused, cursing the director and his cast for wasting two hours of their lives on a rambling, strange and apparently pointless quest for a yellow shark. We should pity these folk and perhaps hold an appeal so that money can be gathered to ease their plight.
The rest of you, my happy friends, are going to walk out of the cinema with huge grins on your faces that will last for days. You will find yourself with an irresistible desire to purchase a red cap and humming the works of David Bowie in Portugese. You will feel dread at the mention of the fearsome jaguar shark, and yet you will be possessed of a slight but persistent sadness that you may never live to see it in the Technicolor flesh.
You, my allies in the struggle against bland and simple-minded entertainment, my brothers-in-arms in the battle against all that is grey in the world, you are the chosen who will bask in the light of Wes Anderson’s work and see true joy.
And if all that sounds over the top, then I blame The Life Aquatic, a film that seems designed to promote extreme reactions.
The Life Aquatic is, undoubtedly, a strange film – a kind of slow-motion slapstick adventure. Steve Zissou (Murray in brilliant form) is an oceanographic filmmaker (a more than slightly seedy version of Jacques Cousteau) who sees his best friend killed by a (possibly mythical) jaguar shark. With the help of the crew of his ship, Belafonte (a reference to Cousteau, who’s ship was The Calypso – the type of song that made Harry Belafonte famous), Zissou determines to hunt the beast down, prove its existence and gain his revenge. On top of this he must cope with a crumbling marriage to Eleanor (Huston), the arrival of Jane (Blanchett), a journalist set on revealing the seedy truth about his fading career, and Ned (Wilson), who may be his long lost son. Or not.
Add declining popularity, the bank meddling in his affairs and placing Bill the accountant (Cort) on board the Belafonte, an intense personal and professional rivalry with Alistair (Goldblum), mutiny amongst the interns and a pirate adventure featuring a three-legged dog and it’s easy to see why Steve Zissou might be feeling that the pressures of life are grinding him down.
What I think will appeal most to people who “get” this film is its determined contrariness and sustained peculiarity. The world created is one of hyper-reality. Anderson’s characters have extraordinary characteristics that are taken, stretched and extrapolated to extreme lengths. Nature explodes from the screen with animals and fish given a delirious jewel-like quality (thanks to some wonderfully effective stop-motion special effects). And Anderson seems to take every opportunity to erode or destroy the wall between film and viewer – literally in the case of the Belafonte, which is shown in cross-section as we travel through her decks.
While Murray, currently on a career-defining roll of high quality performances, is undoubtedly the star here, he receives some very strong support from the rest of the cast. With Wilson playing his usual, likeable oddball and Goldblum and Gambon obviously enjoying themselves, the women (Blanchett and Houston) though good are largely reduced to playing everyone else’s fall guys. Which is perhaps not surprising as The Life Aquatic is (in its own, skewed, probably drug-induced way) a very Boys’ Own sort of adventure. In the end, though, it is Willem Dafoe as the desperately needy German crewman, Klaus Daimler who almost steals the whole film. It is Dafoe’s maddest performance since he played a crazed, gay, cross-dressing FBI Agent in The Boondock Saints and he had me roaring with laughter.
The film has a sting in its tail, however, and it is only when things come to a crunch in the final reel that you realise how successful Anderson and his cast have been in making you care for these characters. When the final confrontation with the mysterious jaguar shark takes place the audience is shocked with a real emotional charge.
The Life Aquatic isn’t going to be to everyone’s taste, but those who really “get it” are going to be made very, very happy. Wes Anderson is one of the very best young directors working in Hollywood and this film cements him as the possessor of a unique, if determinedly skewed vision.