Die Tiefseetaucher

This story is a lighthearted adventure comedy. I too am guilty of being one of those Wes Anderson fans who salivate over all the small details but while watching this I quickly detached myself from the director and his style and previous work and just let "The Life Aquatic" take me along. And that's what you have to do. It's different from his other stuff in that it's more plot driven. There are some wonderful characters but they have to deal more with outside complications than internal struggles. It is similar in tone and style to Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H," what with all the juggling of fighting and death (serious themes dealt with in an objective comedic manner). There's also some Fellini moments (it was mostly filmed at Cinecitta). I loved it. Don't go into this film as a biased hipster Wes Anderson fan, clean the slate and take it with an open mind. It's certainly sillier than Rushmore or Tenenbaums, but it's just as ambitious and exponentially courageous with shots and tone.

To reiterate: more action oriented, funny as all get out, and quite possibly the funnest I've had in a theater all year.

I'm not generally a fan of Wes Anderson. He relies too heavily on the charm of detachment. Burton has this problem too, hidden under the humorous tone. The appeal is a generational thing and I guess I'm too old to simply find that enough.

But here, he does something different than what I have seen elsewhere from him. I think it is because the Owen influence is small here. The form is a movie about making a life which is a movie. Both the movie and the movie within have fantastic elements, but we do have a clear shift to brighter colors and crisper landscapes when within the inner world.

Its all based on synthetic notions of drama: love, purpose, worth. When you sneak up on things this way, you have to play a delicate game, one I think Wes usually flubs. You have to engage by setting a distance that is far enough from the norm that we as viewers can lean into it, and near enough to what we think of as real flesh that we want to.

Bill Murray doesn't understand this balance, because he's all about distance. Never mind, he's just an actor. So you select actors that try for the closeness. Dafoe and Blanchett get this. What they choose to do is simple: they form a real person and layer some cartoonish mannerisms on top. We see through the play and value the real underneath, where we cannot with Murray and Wilson.

Because the whole thing can blend together, we get a wonderful balance of this tension: engagement and studied apartness. I credit Anderson with maintaining this container. It works. And it works because he was smart. You can see that he understands this dynamic well enough to know that we will be impatient with his tricks for very long. So the movie changes tone as it moves along. It changes slowly with less emphasis on the personal abstraction and more on abstracting the physical: the ship, the rooms, beds, sub. It allows Cate to present her womb, which is quite a miracle.

If you read the trivia at IMDb, you find that many top actresses wanted this part. So it is pretty amazing that Cate's condition as a pregnant woman who knows how to turn herself inside out was able to have that condition become so central to the world we see.

This isn't quirky. This isn't comedy. This is extremely sensitive positioning of the audience to allow for deeper penetration. Its a triangulation of "Incident at Loch Ness" and "Cowards Bend the Knee ."

I felt blessed watching it.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

I revisited this about a decade on from when I first watched it. Wes Anderson movies typically feel a little less interesting to me when I revisit them (so he's like the opposite of David Lynch or the Coen Brothers in that regard), so maybe that's why I had reservations about going back to this. But I'm happy to say that The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou worked even more for me a second time, and I think it's right up there as one of Anderson's best.

This might not be a popular opinion, but I feel like he's been pushing it with the artificiality too much in his recent films, to the point where I can't really engage with them emotionally. From a technical perspective, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, and The French Dispatch are all phenomenally well put together, meticulously crafted, and easy to appreciate when it comes to style/visuals. However, they just don't do it for me when it comes to feeling the film, or engaging with the characters. There's just a little too much detachment and/or too many characters. Maybe the films are too well put together. The human element that's apparent in his older films often feels missing.

With most of his stuff made before 2014, there's obviously that Wes Anderson style, but there's just a little more warmth and humanity. They're the right level of detached, to the point where they're not even really emotionally detached at the end of the day. His earlier films can be tremendously moving, and I think The Life Aquatic is a good example of that; the reality is heightened and the characters a little extreme, but not to the point where you detach emotionally. There's plenty of zaniness and quirky humour (not all of it perfect, but most of it works), but there's a heart to the whole thing, and I feel a similar way about The Royal Tenenbaums and maybe even Rushmore.

Maybe I miss the old Wes - I kind of love the old Wes, and I still appreciate the hell out of the new one, but something's missing. I fear the upcoming Asteroid City will be more new Wes than old Wes; it's like he keeps doubling down on it after it worked admittedly well in Grand Budapest Hotel.

Oh well. At least we'll always have Steve Zissou (the last 10-15 minutes of this also stands as the best sequence in Anderson's career so far, especially due to the perfect use of Sigur Ros).

"Life Aquatic" may best be described by the term the critic Ebert gave it, "terminal whimsy." There is a story but, as the writer/director says on the DVD extras, the characters are what count. They are interesting, but it is mostly all silliness, which I got tired of pretty quickly. As did my wife. We also didn't care much for "Royal Tennenbaums", another whimsical Anderson film. The only movie of his I have enjoyed, so far, is "Rushmore" which has more substance.

In a parody of Jacques Cousteau, Bill Murray is good as Steve Zissou, famous explorer who seems more interested in filming something that will sell, than in making legitimate discoveries. Owen Wilson is Ned Plimpton, who shows up after his mother dies, looking for Zissou who may be his father. Cate Blanchett is a reporter, and pregnant, Jane Winslett-Richardson, who goes along on the next adventure intent on documenting it, but also becoming attracted to Ned. Anjelica Huston is Steve's ex-wife, Eleanor Zissou, looking her mannish best. Willem Dafoe is a hoot as Klaus Daimler, and Jeff Goldblum, always good, is Alistair Hennessey, competing and wealthy aquatic explorer.

SPOILERS. The movie begins at a showing of the latest Zissou film where the theater audience finds out Steve's buddy was eaten by what he calls a Leopard Shark, and his next mission is to hunt it down. So that is what most of this movie is about. There are mishaps, but in the end the small sub with "maximum capacity 6 people" is tracking the shark with a dozen people in it. They find the man-eating shark, it is beautiful, they do not kill it. Terminal whimsy. For those who love it, I congratulate you.

This Wes Anderson movie is very quirky but fans of Wes Anderson will not be disappointed. The movie is part a loving parody of Jacques Cousteau, part character study, with a lot of wit and understated acting. Beautifully shot, it is more complex and straightforward than some other Anderson movies, but still has a mesmerizing effect and grows on you upon repeated viewings. Justifiably a cult classic, it is perhaps not the best of Wes Anderson movies, but it is not the worst either, despite unjustly being panned by critics. If you have a functioning brain, give it a try.