A Life Aquatic with Wes Anderson

(Be forewarned that the following is an incomplete review, criticism and subtext into a film. Very little editing or construction has been done to this blog. Thank you.)

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Wes Anderson has struck gold yet again, with his own brand of humor and film making, on his fourth release, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

The makeshift father/son relationships, which began partly in Rushmore and moved on through Royal Tenenbaums, are here as well, as a once-famous oceanographer, Steve Zissou (played by Bill Murray), who is losing his luster among the rich producers and upper-tier society that backs his frequent adventures, must go on one last adventure of self-discovery.

Life Aquatic revolves around a sort of mocku-drama, similar to the documentaries of Jacques Cousteau and other adventuresome wild life hosts, in which pretentious characters must learn to coexist.

The film takes a strange turn of Moby Dick preportions, when Zissou's friend and longtime partner gets allegedly eaten by a jaguar shark. With Zissou's first installment of his jaguar shark documentary tanking, and the bitter taste for revenge in his mouth, Zissou scrambles together cash and crew to go on the great shark hunt.

The viewers of the film, much like the Zissou's upper-class audience begins to question the sanity of the aging oceanographer and also the validity behind the alleged jaquar shark.

Throughout the films, Anderson provides us with little glimpses of animation unseen in previous films (perhaps a new endeavor, a test run before he tries his and at more animation, much like Richard Linklater's use of rotoscoping in Waking Life coming full force in A Scanner Darkly). These little glimpses build and build until Anderson floods the audience and his protagonist with a crescendo of images and finally a glimpse of the great and massive beast, the jaguar shark.

Bill Murray has done it once more, immortalizing his own performances and summoning our attention to another breakout character. Murray seems perfect for Anderson’s film because their chemistry and sense of humor mirror each other so closely. Murray and Anderson always wait to the crucial moment to allow their generally dry, quirky characters to open up, creating a pivotal relationship with the audience.

Like two of his earlier performances (Lost in Translation and Tenenbaums), Murray plays a straight, dry humor Nabokovian protagonist to his younger female foils, and despite the actresses (and characters) losing the advantage in experience, they often are able to out manuever the wily, learned man. It's like watching a live-action psychological unfolding of a Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon.

But that seems to be the equation that facilitates Murray's humor the most. And for Anderson.

All four films explore relationships impossible to fulfill, mostly because of age differences, i.e., Rushmore, Tenenbaums, and Life Aquatic, or cultural differences in Bottle Rocket.