The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) is difficult to characterize. It is a strangely entertaining film that flouts in its understated way numerous conventions. The loose plot has to do with a famous explorer and oceanographic naturalist Steve Zissou, vaguely similar to Jacques Cousteau. In the film he hires a film crew to chronicle his attempt to find and kill a jaguar shark that ate his partner. His quest for revenge is also an attempt to revive his flagging career and self-esteem. A son whom he has never acknowledged suddenly shows up to join the crew. Bill Murray in his usual ultra suppressed way plays Steve Zissou. Anjelica Huston is his sometimes estranged wife. Wilson plays Zissou's son Ned, while Cate Blanchett plays a reporter writing about the voyage.

Much of the film takes place on a bisected ocean vessel--as if the vessel has been sawed in half, vertically, from stem to stern, so that we get a cross-section view of what is going on in the ship and watch characters moving from one room or deck to another. I was reminded in a strange way of a Lars von Trier film. The Life Aquatic moves casually from one scene to the next. Every element is casual and underplayed and strange. The result is a wonderful sense of whimsy. Murray is the heart of the film's casual atmosphere. Huston, who appears in relatively few scenes, backs him up. She is as droll and dark as she was in the Addams family films.

The only real tension comes in the final climactic scene where Zissou and crew board a submarine and descend to the depths to view the fabled jaguar shark. (The rivalry between Zissou and his son over Blanchett's reporter generates no tension at all, just some weird comic moments). The scene in the sub is handled in a whimsical, off-handed fashion. As the submarine descends, we notice a sign on the inner wall announcing that the vessel can safely handle six passengers at a time, while at least twice that many are aboard. The passengers gaze casually out of the windows, watching the digitally rendered undersea life (the fish are cartoon-like animations). As the shark approaches, the reporter asks whether they are safe in the sub. Zissou answers, "I doubt it." The shark swims menacingly around the sub, then swims away. We see Zissou, surrounded by ex-wife and crew, gazing out into the blackness of the deep, moved by their encounter. For Zissou this moment seems a culmination of his career, but the emotion he displays, for the first time in the film--emotion still subdued and restrained, but clearly deep emotion--is not for the shark or his failure to take revenge on the animal but for the son he never had and never felt he needed until he was lost. Everyone in the sub leans over and hugs or comforts Zissou. The scene described seems absolutely ludicrous, but it is the warm heart of this wacky, strange, charming film from Wes Anderson.