The Gravitas of Wes Anderson - The Aquatic Life with Steve Zissou

Ahead of The Phoenician Scheme, I revisited The Aquatic Life with Steve Zissou, Anderson’s first collaboration with Noel Baumbach and his fourth feature overall. I remember being truly impressed with the film on its release and agreed with many that it didn’t quite match the fullness and brio of The Royal Tenenbaums, but I was perplexed by the more negative post mortems the picture received and mystified that it remains considered as a lesser work.

Some found the film too glib or too fanciful. For others, it was too arch, too studied.  Or too busy. Or whatever. What struck me this last go round was how full of heart and pathos it is and how deeply felt the emptiness of the title character is portrayed by Bill Murray in what frankly is one of his finest performances. 

Unlike Royal Tenenbaum, Zissou is more genuinely taken by the sense of connection he has with Owen Wilson’s Ned, who might be his son that he abandoned decades earlier. He also seems to genuinely care about the people around him, even if he’s shit at communicating it. This is particularly true of his relationship with his wife Eleanor (Angelica Huston reminding me of how good she is). You sense a general fatigue; Zissou’s treading water. 

His partner and oldest friend and partner Esteban (Seymour Cassel) is eaten by a newly discovered species that Zissou calls a “jaguar shark”; his latest documentary was met with thudding indifference; Angelica’s done and leaving him; and he’s pretty much broke. His financial consultant - Michael Gambon, in the same year he becomes Dumbledore (1), turns in a dry and drily humorous turn here - is still trying to drum up investors so Steve can find the shark and kill it in revenge, despite protestations that it might be an endangered species and should be studied. 

On the night of the premiere of his documentary, there is a party on the Belafonte, Zissou’s answer to Cousteau’s Calypso. It’s there that he meets Ned whose existence he was aware of. The result of a fling with Ned’s mother, Ned was a fan from childhood and grew up to be an airline pilot. Owen Wilson plays Ned as an observant, quiet, and generous young man. Zissou takes a liking to him and doesn’t balk when Ned approaches him. Indeed, he tells Ned that he knew of Ned’s existence. At this point of the film, he tells Ned he’d heard about him a few years ago; later in the movie, that Ned’s mother had contacted Zissou and told him about the child. 

Ned asked why Steve didn’t try to get in touch and in turn, Zissou tells him that he didn’t like the idea of being a father and that he doesn’t like fathers. 

Once the crew is established at their compound, Cate Blanchett as journalist Jane Winslet-Richardson shows up. She was supposed to have been picked up by one of Zissou’s staff, but wasn’t and had grab a drunken ferryman to bring her out. She’s smart, asks difficult questions (Murray’s deadpan wriggling out from answering her inquiries is so good), and is five months pregnant. She’s tough, obviously, and eventually takes a liking to Ned. 

The last player to come on board is Bud Cort as the bank bondsman who’s been sent to ensure that Zissou isn’t profligate with spending the funds offered by Ned when the other backer turns down funding for Zissou. Gambon’s Osear Drakoulias is not the smooth operator Steve was hoping he’d be. 

All of this is well and good, but at the heart of it is a story about a man - like many in Anderson’s oeuvre - who is emotionally stunted in critical ways, seems to have a good heart if an uncertain moral compass, and who is driven by a code to set things right. Sure, Esteban comes to mind, but also, the relationship with Ned, and even his rival, Jeff Goldblum’s Alistair Hennessy. 

His moral compass often bumps up against ethics like stealing Hennessy’s tech as he nears the jaguar fish (only to have same tech absconded with by Filipino pirates) and this was on top of sailing through unprotected waters, placing everyone in harm’s way, which leads his navigator Anne-Marie to lead a mutiny against Zissou. Still, he persists, at no small cost. 

This is the first time Anderson uses an adventurer as the centerpiece of his ensemble. And as fantastical as the adventures may be (perhaps not so much here, but certainly, in later films), there is an emotional ground that anchors those elements.

What I came around to this time was how layered Murray’s performance is. He was on a roll of remarkable work. I’m not one to buy the idea that Wes Anderson gave Murray a jump-start with Rushmore, but there is a certain magic to the work they do together. This isn’t to say that everything he’s done has been golden, but that he was suffering repeated critical or box-office losses is reductive. Bill Murray’s growth as an actor has been steady for over forty years, and to be sure, it is around this period that he begins to take more reflective roles. 

However, you could go back to his adaptation of Maughm’s The Razor’s Edge, where he really began to stretch his wings a bit more. His Larry Darrell isn’t what I saw in the book (I didn’t see Tyrone Power as Darrell, either), and there are a lot of Murray’s comic tics in the film, but he does a credible job of essaying the unease of a man with the way things are and driven to see behind them. It’s a youthful period work for Murray that points the way to the seriocomic and straight up dramatic actor he would become. 

By the time we get to his work with Anderson, Murray had bonafide classics under his belt and seemed to grow increasingly comfortable in his skin as an actor entering his middle years. By the time we get to Zissou, he’s figured out how suited he is to minimalism and a laconic approach to acting that would do Harry Dean Stanton proud. Like Stanton, Murray is able to put across the wistfulness of the passage of time, missed or lost opportunities, and failed dreams. 

Zissou’s a plum part because the character still has a quest in him, still has a fire that gets rained on a bit, but keeps aflame. If Gene Hackman’s Tenenbaum was still a grifting force of nature, Murray’s Zissou is still curious about the world around him. He understands why people would leave like Eleanor or why a woman like Jane would be put off by his advances, but would still continue writing her piece about him even if everything is going tits up.

This latter brings us to another aspect of Anderson’s work that is often filed under “bittersweet”, but that’s an identifier that does a disservice to what Anderson accomplishes with his colorful sleight of hand. When death, for  example, comes to a character in one of his films, the circumstances and handling of the specific passing and of death in general, may come off glib or “twee” (a word that seems to have stuck to his work for no good reason other than journalistic laziness), but listen to the dialog, watch the actors. No, very often there is no pathos or melodramatic beating of the chest, but there is a genuine acknowledgment of the finality of human existence and if it’s couched in a comic mise-en-scene (and it might be laugh out loud funny), the very real undertone of tragedy remains.

Consider how, in Asteroid City, Augie Steenbeck deals with telling his children about the death of their mother. Admittedly, Augie is actually a character in a play, as performed by Jones Hall (Jason Schwartzman), so there is a seemingly ironic distance, but that distance is breached when later in the film, Jones goes to Schubert Green, the director in charge of the TV production of the play, and says he still doesn’t get the play.Green tells Hall that it doesn’t matter; “Just keep telling the story.”

It’s this that can be a key to much of what some see as Anderson’s style triumphing over substance. The gravity of there situation is still present in the telling of the story. That indefinable quality that literature and performance gives us when confronting the big issues of mortal existence is in the telling.

As carefully structured as an Anderson text might be, as much as that is mirrored in and given life in the set design, shot composition, and camera movement, the weight of the existential unease remains. You’ll still laugh - you should! - but don’t mistake the humor for writing off the issues at hand. 

Some feel Anderson is too much of a satirist and I’ve never quite gotten this. Sure, there is satire in much of his work, but it serves a greater narrative purpose. Archness is never an end in itself; it typically is an aid to puncturing the distance we sense between ourselves and the characters.

Augie couldn’t bring himself to tell his three little daughters and his older son Woodrow about his wife’s passing. The time wasn’t right. His dad (Tom Hanks, who fits in with Anderson’s ensemble seamlessly) disabuses of him of the notion that there is ever a right time. When he does tell the kids, they take it pretty well. No tears are shed, but there’s a melancholia that descends, nevertheless. 

Ague points out that death is too abstract for them, so he says “let’s say she’s in heaven, which doesn’t exist for me, of course. But you’re Episcopalian.” It’s a great line. And funny. But glib? Arch? Not necessarily. 

Likewise, Zissou is visibly upset with Esteban’s end, but delivers his statement that he’s going to hunt the shark down and kill it in such a deadpan manner, it’s understandable that some people might feel like Anderson is trafficking in a bit. Of course, so much of the fun of this and other Anderson joints, is that the deadpan delivery is precisely what adds to the hilarity of the dialog. There’s no getting around it, but sometimes, we miss what’s underneath the laughter.

And that brings us back to The Aquatic Life with Steve Zissou. It is a fucking funny movie. I’ve written about it almost as if it were a dirge, but this is more to do with wanting to look at the piece through older eyes. I think a lot of what I read in it, too, might stem more from Baumbach’s influence on the script, but I’d be hard-pressed to defend that thesis. 

This was, also, the first of his films that delineated the definitive “Wes Anderson look”; the cutaway sets, the rectilinear compositions, and horizontal pans that make you feel like you’re in a Sunday newspaper comic strip. I’m sad that Robert Yeoman isn't the working as cinematographer on The Phoenician Scheme. Anderson’s collaborators are so integral to the work, and while he’s hit on a signature style, you do come away with the feeling that if one part isn’t just right ,the whole piece falls apart, and I’ve not seen that happen.

The sequence that puts a fitting bow on the film is when the crew sees the jaguar shark underwater in the submarine. It’s a lovely sequence of pop art critters brought to life by Henry Selick’s stop-motion animation and infused with a wonder you don’t often associate with Anderson in this way. Zissou isn’t going to destroy the fish, but he acknowledges its beauty and asks wistfully the creature remembers him. Then, in a quiet moment, each member of the crew lay their hands on him gently, supportive, and embracing. They’ve all been through so much. It’s a film about loss; of funds, of reputation, of life. It is equally a film about what we find, and that sequence is the measure of all of it.

Yet, it is kind of a mess. Anderson is working in a new key, different from The Royal Tenenbaums, but that will bring him forward into the twenty-first century as one of our bolder auteurs. The mess is lovely, though.

Note:

1. Jesus, Gambon had a year! Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban where he steps into the role, Layer Cake, Being Julia, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and the film under consideration here. I don’t know why I forget how busy he is and how the hell does he manage to be so good?