MasterChugs Theater: ‘The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou’

On the face of it, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, is an adventure tale about a Jacques Cousteau-on-the-skids-type who decides to pull an Ahab on the shark that ate his buddy. But mostly, like all Wes Anderson movies, it’s about being 11 1/2 sometime around the late ’70s, an age-era axis favored by Anderson and at least partly attributable to his current age of 35.

But Anderson doesn’t make nostalgic movies, exactly. He makes movies about the way nostalgia works on people — which is different. All of his characters have longed for something weirdly ineffable, like the present, or the adult lives they imagined as kids. Oceanographer, documentarian and hubristic tragic hero Steve Zissou longs for all of the above—plus a legacy; a son-figure; the reporter who has come to write a profile on him; a puff piece to get his career back on track; some money; a little consideration; a little understanding and revenge on a shark.

An exquisitely evocative movie that elevates rueful melancholia to a superpower, The Life Aquatic, co-written with Noah Baumbach, is not exactly a plot-lover’s pizza. Anderson is all about the resonant image, an anachronistic tic he cops to up front. Before the first character is introduced, the camera lingers in wide-angle on a large Renaissance tableau serving as a backdrop for a stage. It’s a familiar shorthand: Frame the vantage point, maybe hang drapes in the periphery, and wait for someone to meander into the frame. What we’re about to see is not reality but an artistic interpretation of it—no more a “slice of life” than a slice of pie.

The Life Aquatic does that thing movies used to think they were supposed to do: paint with light, sculpt in time, drive you nuts with longing for something hard to pinpoint that you probably never had, deliver an emotional experience from which you won’t recover. In the movie, this is achieved through an ineffable alchemy of red wool caps, pale blue Speedos, “Zissou” Adidas, the welling (twice) of Bill Murray’s tears and Tintin tableaux of the entire ragtag crew—including a turban-wearing cameraman named Vikram—crammed into a yellow deep-sea exploration vessel.

But the shark turns out to be a spotted McGuffin. The real story—or as Steve sells it to Vikram, “the relationship subplot”—begins when Steve is approached by young Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), a diffident pilot for Air Kentucky whom Steve quickly introduces as “probably my son.” Ned is the second reminder in about as many minutes of Steve’s many betrayals of Eleanor, but as far as Steve’s concerned, his timing couldn’t be better. As he tells Eleanor later, after his hubris and megalomania has caused the expedition to all but end in disaster,

“I believe in the boy.”

“Why?”

“Because he looks up to me.”

In what could be the perfect theater, The Life Aquatic would play on a permanent double bill with The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. Anderson and Stephen Hillenburg, SpongeBob’s creator, share not only a taste for nautical nonsense, but also a willingness to carry the banner of unfettered imaginative silliness into battle against the tyranny of maturity.

They also both understand the sublimity that well-chosen pop music can impart even to throwaway moments. The seaborne contrivances of The Life Aquatic may make you a little queasy, but the soundtrack is impossible to argue with. It consists mainly of early David Bowie songs – “Queen Bitch,” “Space Oddity,” “Five Years” and the like – sung samba style, in lilting Brazilian Portuguese, by Seu Jorge. Like much else in the movie, these songs seem to come from another world: one which is small, crowded and, on its own skewed terms, oddly perfect.