2004 happened to be a surprising year at the movies for offbeat comedies. I’m thinking specifically of Jared & Jerusha Hess’ Napoleon Dynamite, David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees, and Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Only one of them was a hit in any kind of way, but all had the quirk factor jacked up to eleven and delighted me in unusual ways from most comedies.
Somehow, Dynamite became a sleeper hit with its lines and “memes” even entering the popular vernacular (I miss “Vote for Pedro” shirts). Huckabees has always been an endlessly fascinating film to me and yet I completely understand why most folks give it a pass. It may be the strangest premise for a movie ever—warring existential detectives, questions of metaphysics, a movie that is both free-flowing and driven by the ugliness of many of its characters. The movie never had a prayer. Heck, it took me five times before I understood the film, but I kept going back because it was just too strange and interesting to ignore. It’s sad Russell now says it’s his least favorite film. I’d rather have ten more Huckabees than another American Hustle.
Zissou was an entirely different matter. Up until that point, Wes Anderson had been kind of the golden boy for offbeat cinema. While Martin Scorcese had been a champion of the rough, early Bottle Rocket, his style (from the wide shots to the out-of-time costumes, to the stately orderliness) really emerged in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, the latter probably being his second greatest film following Moonrise Kingdom.
But The Life Aquatic perplexed most. It was not that it was hard to understand (like Huckabees) or that it wasn’t sure of itself as a film, but it showed Anderson, a master of the offbeat, finding humor in darker, more melancholic places. Somehow, in his Jacques Cousteau-inspired film, he found the hidden off-beats within the off-beats. It does not herald itself a classic, like Tenenbaums, but it is a subtler, more probing film—a great film, but far from perfect.
Despite this, I gravitated toward it right away. It had a lot to do with who I was as a person twenty years ago. I was nearing the end of college, feeling on the edge of a precipice that would eventually become what counselors might call a “quarter-life crisis” (which must have been invented for millennials). While Zissou’s exhaustion with the world was based on a long life of losing his way, my malaise was that of a younger person already exhausted by a world I didn’t feel I understood. Zissou was somehow a kindred spirit. I could feel every one of his deep sighs within my bones. I even named my very first blog after one of my favorite of his lines: “Son of a ****, I’m sick of these dolphins.”
But Zissou’s malaise was interpreted by most critics as an artistic malaise for Anderson. Most felt bored by the film, wondering why it wasn’t as funny as it might have been. The band Steely Dan even wrote an open letter to Anderson telling him, with The Life Aquatic, he had lost his way. For all I know, Anderson may have been at a “lost” place at that time and that lost-ness might be exhibited in his main character. But I also think the film is funnier than one thinks. You just must look between the lines.
Unlike his previous efforts, the lines themselves are not as funny as the quiet moments. What is funny is the peculiar squishing sound a boat-plane makes landing on the water, the awkward silences between exchanges, the purposefully fake-looking stop-motion creatures. It is highly subtle stuff. Much like wine, it is for those with a specific palette who can pick up on the slightest of scents or nuances of taste.
As is typical of an Anderson film, it has a top-notch, mostly star cast—Bill Murray and Anjelica Huston returning from Tenenbaums, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Michael Gambon, and faces of yesteryear that somehow never got the limelight they deserved. I’m thinking here of Bud Cort (Harold and Maude), Noah Taylor (Flirting), and Seymour Cassell, who appeared in many Anderson films before his death. That is not to say it is a perfectly cast film. Most notably, Cate Blanchett sticks out like a sore thumb. Gwyneth Paltrow was the first choice and would have been more than fine in the part. As she is, the character is not very fleshed out and Blanchett’s performance doesn’t seem to gel much with the others. Perhaps if the character was not English, I could see it working a little more, but, somehow, you are never as drawn to her as Steve and his son (probably) Ned are.
Which brings us to the Owen Wilson problem. Prior to Zissou, Wilson was Anderson’s co-screenwriter. This time, with Wilson’s film career taking off, that honor went to Noah Baumbach (who went onto direct his own offbeat films). But while Wilson’s role is pivotal in the film, like Blanchett, he doesn’t work entirely due to a distracting Kentucky-twinged accent and a performance that seemed to emerge after a melatonin binge. Who would have made a better Ned? I don’t entirely know. But it is as sad to see Wilson play Ned as it was to not have him play the Edward Norton role in Moonrise Kingdom, which seemed more up his alley. Bad casting decisions can make or break a movie but, most significantly, this is Bill Murray’s movie, and he plays the part so effortlessly that I think most people just didn’t see it.
My close friends at the time, however, were all over it. I remember printing out my personalized Team Zissou ID badge from the film’s website, ordering a red cap (but no speedo), and buying the 2-disc Criterion DVD as soon as it came out. This was a film that really captured a moment in my life on film. I had yet to make all the mistakes Steve made, but I was about to go into the adult world and make them and maybe somehow, I knew it.
Over time, The Life Aquatic has had more admirers—at least more than something like The Darjeeling Limited. Anderson has gone on to make two perfect children’s films—Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs. While I still cannot wrap my head around The Grand Budapest Hotel and what it “means,” I thought The French Dispatch was an exceptional return to form and even more challenging than any of his previous work, particularly in terms of structure.
Zissou is now a cult film. Not a large cult, but sizable enough. Perhaps it’s only made for a handful of people who would pick up on its nuances or, at the very least, welcome the delightful oddness—like Seu Jorge playing Portuguese bossa nova variations on David Bowie classics, the madcap interstitials (“Let me tell you about my boat…), and, of course, Goldblum at his most Golblumian.
If you haven’t seen it, grab a Campari on the rocks and settle in for a movie about malaise and how to get one’s “Zissou” back.
