Overboard

Bill Murray in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic. Photo by Philippe Antonello. Courtesy Touchstone Pictures

While filming the 1965 period medical drama Red Beard, director Akira Kurosawa stocked a medicine cabinet with instruments from the 1860s, even though no character ever pulls open a single drawer. Wes Anderson is a kindred obsessive; unopened journals in The Royal Tenenbaums contained stories that no one would read. Shelves of books in Rushmore were selected with great care, spines out but never broken.

In The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Anderson’s fourth feature, this love of detail begins to look like obsessive compulsive disorder. Somehow, the small eclipses the big; too many painstakingly constructed moments come to resemble wondrous little bobbles dangling from nothing. Since Anderson was anointed boy wunderkind nearly a decade ago, his signature arch quirks have been working their way from the margins to the centre, crowding out the emotional richness that made Rushmore so heartfelt and Bottle Rocket so funny. Though The Royal Tenenbaums still won me over with its eccentric mood and Gene Hackman’s gleeful performance as a corrupt patriarch who drives a mean go-cart, the film flashed a danger sign that Anderson was careening towards cute. It’s tempting to say “self-consciously” cute, but that’s not quite right; if anything, he’s obliviously cute. In interviews, he often seems puzzled that audiences don’t fall in love with the worlds he creates as deeply as he does.

Bill Murray plays the titular Zissou, a fading celebrity oceanographer who’s like a more defeated Jacques Cousteau, if Cousteau had a wee pot habit and funding problems. His best friend Esteban is eaten by a jaguar shark and the event becomes his latest film, eliciting a massive public yawn. Still, Zissou is determined to make the sequel in which he vows to track down the elusive beast who ate Esteban: a documentary version of Moby Dick. Asked why, as an environmentalist, he is making a film about killing an endangered species, Zissou considers for a moment and answers: “Revenge.”

Team Zissou lives on The Belafonte, a ship as ragged and mouldy as its inhabitants. The camera scrolls through a bisection of the boat that’s like a sword-sliced model submerged in a fish tank: there’s the Chinese-designed sauna; the library carefully cultivated by the estranged Mrs. Zissou, Elinor (Anjelica Houston); the special viewing area where a crew member can lie on his belly and scan the ocean through tiny windows.

Motley Crew: Bill Murray and Team Zissou in The Life Aquatic. Photo by Philippe Antonello. Courtesy Touchstone Pictures

Anderson is so tapped in to the awe of youth that one wonders if he simply adapted drawings from a childhood sketchbook: two research dolphins, cameras strapped to their backs, travel below the boat like the final flourish of a five-year-old’s crayon. It feels as if the ship emerged first from Anderson’s imagination and he then had to invent people to fill the rooms (pardon the generalization, but isn’t that how boys play? Design the tank first, the soldiers later. Girls do the opposite: name the babies, build the dollhouse). There’s Klaus (Willem Dafoe), a German engineer in all-weather shorts who’s pathologically devoted to his captain; Jane (Cate Blanchett), a pregnant reporter and Ned (Owen Wilson), a chivalrous Kentucky pilot who may – or may not – be Zissou’s son.

Northrop Frye reminded us that creative repetition is the stuff of art, and most directors make the same movie many times over a career, but if the animating force of one’s work is surprise – and Anderson’s first films delighted with surprise – when that goes, what’s left? To his legions of fans, Aquatic may seem like a retread, and the film will succeed or fail based on one’s level of affection for Anderson’s trademarks: Team Zissou wear funny red hats and silly diving uniforms; cancer destroys off-screen loved ones; fathers and sons move slowly across the gulf towards each other. Those who don’t recognize the repetition will probably be perplexed, even bored, by the flat, ironic delivery and the thin story that veers this way and that, running into pirates and other enemies (Jeff Goldblum is very funny as Zissou ’s slick nemesis).

Anderson co-wrote the rambling script with Noah Baumbach, but it’s easy to wonder whether the director was even present during story meetings or if he spent most of his time up in his bedroom sketching a cartoon underworld. This romantic computer-generated sea is awash in Sugar Crabs, Crayon Seahorses and a Rhinestone Blue Fish, a blue fish literally covered in rhinestones (Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas, designed the creatures). They are lovely, and fleeting, and absolutely necessary to Anderson’s vision. But whether anyone wants to share that vision anymore is the real question. The exercise feels immature somehow. Can a fan – and I have been a fan – outgrow childlike wonder?

Murray has always been a good foil for Anderson’s preciousness because his natural state is to float above the action, uninterested. But when that contempt is challenged by the right person, as in Rushmore, where he played a man indulging a midlife crisis who’s knocked back to earth by precocious adolescent hero Max Fischer, he’s shamed by his own outsider status, even saddened. The honesty that Anderson coaxed from Murray in Rushmore became full-fledged warmth in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, to great emotional effect. But here, glazed and understated even in his wacky Zissou outfits, Murray retreats again. As the beloved leader of this rough and tumble group – “We’re a bunch of orphans, don’t you know,” he announces – he doesn’t seem like someone who could have earned their adulation.

It seems strange to complain about an excess of imagination when films like Blade: Trinity exist, and in a way, even the most flawed Wes Anderson film is worth a million Giglis. Despite the ironic posturing, you feel that Anderson desperately wants to say something sincere about the loneliness that drives great men like Max Fischer, and Royal Tenenbaum, and Steve Zissou. “Please don’t make fun of me,” more than one male character pleads. But in Aquatic, moments of sheer, breathtaking joy – the underwater climax contains a gentle display of familial kindness – are more rare than moments of visual showmanship.

Throughout the film, Brazilian actor Seu Jorge appears, strumming an acoustic guitar and singing Portuguese versions of David Bowie songs. They are lovely songs, but after the fourth or fifth interlude, I began to wonder why he was there. An inside wink to those who can distinguish early from mid-period Bowie? Perhaps Anderson made so much of him just because the music is beautiful. It’s not enough. Like Steve Zissou, Anderson isn’t living up to his potential for greatness. He needs to chase that white whale, and finally capture something profound rather than merely charming.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.