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The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
(2004)
Dir: Wes Anderson
The movie is fucking depressing--as a whole and in fragments. The storytelling is hasty and apathetic, and despite a few notable exceptions (Willem Dafoe and Jeff Goldblum) the acting is forced and uneven. It kind of pains me to say this, but Billy Murray gets too much credit as an actor. When he’s good he’s really fucking good, but when he’s being lazy, it really shows. As Dr. Peter Venkman, in Ghostbusters, Murray demonstrated what he was capable of with a devastating sleight of hand. Where Stripes brought his comedic amplitude in the realm of cinema to a much larger audience, it was Ghostbusters that showed how dramatically potent he could be as well. He made the game look so easy, it didn’t seem like he was even trying. In dreadful films like The Man Who Knew Too Little, (and there have been a few of these on his resume: Larger Than Life, Garfield) Murray plods in a zigzag line, barely conscious, and barely able to feign interest. He single-handedly kept the contemptuous Lost in Translation from flailing completely headlong into trite shitdom, so he clearly has the ability to make a bad film watchable. But as evidenced here, when he’s not into it, it’s going to show, and in a movie with as many sinkholes as The Life Aquatic, the ship is bound to sink. Murray trudges through this film like he was smoking even more grass than the begrudged character he plays. But Murray’s disinterest in the project shows not just in his portrayal of Steve Zissou, it seems to reach much deeper. Each time I’ve seen him plugging The Life Aquatic on television, he radiates the sad, belated drudgery that makes up the pith of the picture.
Zissou is a Jacque Cousteau-type sea-adventurer, at a strange crossroads in his life. In a rushed bit of back story, it’s revealed that his best friend has been eaten by a mysterious, glowing shark, and that Murray is hell-bent on killing the beast. Almost from the first frame the movie seems disingenuous. Zissou’s dead friend is given none of the weight that Anderson usually excels at injecting even his minor characters with. A simple scene depicting the two sharing a pot of tea in complete silence would have improved the tone of the whole picture. Furthermore, when Owen Wilson is introduced as Ned Plimpton, Zissou’s estranged son, the meeting is so devoid of emotion, that you half-expect one of them to burst into some soft-shoe. Their relationship is strained, but not because they are a father and son who have not seen one another in over twenty years, but because Anderson doesn’t seem to give even a lackadaisical shit about them. All his energy feels concentrated on highlighting grandiose sets (which are remarkable) and trying to force swollen David Bowie songs into mediocre scenes. Because Anderson is such a unique director, it‘s hard for this film to exist solely as a bad movie. It’s a bad Wes Anderson movie; something that has the potential to ruin thousands of rainy days. He conspired with Noah Baumbach on this script as opposed to Wilson, his co-writer on previous projects. Based on what The Life Aquatic effuses, it seems as though Wilson is the one responsible for a significant portion of the ingenious timing and livid characterization that made Bottle Rocket, Rushmore and The Royal Tennenbaums such endearing classics. Perhaps the true auteur is Anderson-Wilson, and not Anderson.
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| If you life this movie, the Internet Movie Database also reccomends, Leathal Weapon 3 (1992). |
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