The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) Review
7/10
Steve Zissou, an oceanographer whose documentaries nobody watches any more, sets out to find and kill the shark that ate his partner. A young man appears claiming to be his son.
It was received as self-indulgent and expensive and it has aged into the most emotionally direct thing Anderson has made, which nobody expected including, I suspect, Anderson.
It cost around fifty million dollars, took about thirty-four, and effectively ended his run of unbroken critical successes. He did not make another live-action film for three years.
The 7 is honest. The film is baggy, the middle wanders badly, and several subplots exist because an actor was available. It also contains the single best scene Anderson has directed and a lead performance considerably braver than the film around it deserves.
The Boat Is a Cutaway
The Belafonte is shown once in a famous shot as a cross-section, every compartment visible at the same time, like an architectural diagram or a doll’s house.
That image is the film in miniature. Zissou has built a world that can be displayed, with a sauna, an editing suite, a research lab, a massage room and a dolphin tank, and the point of all of it is to be looked at.
It was a genuine set, a fully detailed cross-section cutaway of the ship built on Fellini’s old stage at Cinecitta in Rome, constructed so the camera could travel through it. The expense of that shot is part of what the film is about.
The vessel is a personality made of rooms, and when it starts falling apart the collapse is literal and thematic at once. The equipment does not work. The submarine is patched. The crew is unpaid.
Anderson’s symmetry, which is often described as a tic, is doing something specific here. Zissou arranges everything, including people, to be photographed, and the film’s compositions are his compositions.
The Team Zissou uniforms, the red caps, the custom Adidas, the branded everything: all of it is a man who has built an identity that can be merchandised and can no longer fund it.
A setting a character has designed themselves is free characterization and the cheapest available. What somebody chooses to build, and what they leave out, will tell a reader more than a page of description ever manages.
The specific technique is inventory. Zissou has a sauna and no working sonar. He has an editing suite and an unpaid crew. Each pairing is a choice about what mattered to him, and the reader assembles a personality from a list of objects without being told anything.
The test is to write out what your character owns, has built, or has arranged, and then check whether any of it is impractical. If everything is functional you have described a competent person and learned nothing. The revealing items are always the ones that cost money and do no work.
What the Film Is About
Failure, and specifically the failure of a man whose entire identity is being watched by people who have stopped watching.
Every professional humiliation is precise. The funding refusals. The screening where the audience walks out during the question session. The younger rival with better equipment and a corporate sponsor. The crew who no longer respect him and stay because they have nowhere else to be.
Anderson is unusually direct about this, which is why the film sits oddly in his filmography. The Royal Tenenbaums holds its sadness at an arch distance. This one does not.
The son plot is not sentimental and that is its achievement. Zissou is bad at it. He resents Ned, competes with him over a woman, uses him for money, and is still trying by the end, which is the most any character in the film manages.
Ned’s death is abrupt, offscreen in effect, and unearned in the way real ones are. A helicopter fails because the equipment was never maintained, which is the film’s argument arriving as a plot event.
The scene where Zissou tells the crew he has no plan, in a cabin, quietly, is the moment the performance stops being funny.
Bill Murray Is Doing Something Different
This is the third Anderson film with Murray and the first where he is the whole load, and the performance has almost no charm deployed.
Zissou is not likeable. He is vain, dismissive, and cruel to people who depend on him, and Murray plays him without asking for sympathy at any point. There is no scene engineered to make you forgive him.
What Murray finds is the exhaustion underneath the vanity. Zissou is tired, and the tiredness is in the physical performance: the way he sits, the pauses, the speed at which he abandons an argument.
It came in the run that includes Lost in Translation the year before and Broken Flowers the year after, which is the period where Murray became a serious actor by simply doing less.
The line where he says he has never seen a bull shark, delivered flatly to a room, is the closest the film comes to a thesis statement about a man whose expertise may be fabricated.
Anderson has said the character was partly based on Jacques Cousteau and partly on a version of authorial vanity he recognized in himself, which explains the film’s unusual sting.
The Jaguar Shark
At the end they find the shark from a submersible. Everybody is crowded into the vessel, the crew and the son’s mother and the rival and the bond company stooge, all pressed together in a small space.
Zissou looks at it and says he wonders if it remembers him. Then he says he has no idea, and cries.
It is the only completely unguarded moment in Anderson’s filmography to that point. No irony, no symmetry doing a joke, no arch distance. Just a man looking at the thing he came to kill and choosing not to.
Sigur Ros is playing, the creature is a stop-motion animal by Henry Selick that looks like nothing real, and the artificiality is the point. It is a fantastical animal in a film about a man who may have invented his own career.
Everybody puts a hand on him. It is the only physical contact in the film that is not a fight or a formality.
The whole baggy picture exists to arrive there, and the arrival is worth the trip, which is a sentence I would not write about most films with this many problems.
An ending can retroactively justify a great deal of structural mess, and it is worth understanding the mechanism instead of treating it as luck. What the last scene does is answer a question the film has been asking without stating: whether there is anything real underneath the performance.
The construction requirement is that the question must be present throughout even if unarticulated. Every scene of Zissou performing, merchandising and lying is building the question, so the moment he stops performing is an answer to something the audience has been carrying. Without that accumulation the scene would be a nice moment in a bad film.
The test is to state, in one sentence, the question your final scene answers, then check whether every earlier scene contributes to asking it. Scenes that do not are your baggy middle, and you can either cut them or find the thread that connects them. What you cannot do is add a moving ending to a story that was not asking anything.
The Cast Is Half the Problem
The ensemble is enormous and roughly half of it has nothing to do, which is the clearest symptom of the film’s structural looseness.
Cate Blanchett is playing a pregnant journalist with an absent partner, and the character is given an arc that never resolves and a romance with Ned that exists to create a rivalry the film does not need.
Jeff Goldblum’s Alistair Hennessey is a good joke, a better-funded rival with a nicer boat and a phone that works, and the film keeps returning to him without doing anything new.
Anjelica Huston plays Eleanor, described as the brains of Team Zissou, and the film says this repeatedly without ever showing it. She leaves, comes back, and is right about everything, which is a function instead of a person.
Willem Dafoe’s Klaus is the exception. A German engineer with a childlike need for Zissou’s approval, jealous of Ned, given perhaps twelve lines, and the funniest and saddest thing in the film after Murray. The moment he is called dear boy is a payoff to nothing anybody planned.
The pirates, the bond company representative, the interns and the three-legged dog are all fine and none of them is load-bearing, and the middle hour is where they all live.
An ensemble becomes a liability at the point where a character is present because they are interesting instead of because the story requires them. Anderson had access to Blanchett, Goldblum, Huston and Dafoe, and used all of them, and the film pays for it in a middle hour that services people instead of advancing anything.
The diagnostic is to ask what would break if you removed each character entirely. Klaus is load-bearing because Zissou’s relationship with him defines what Zissou does to people who love him. Hennessey could be a single scene. Eleanor could be a phone call. Nothing structural collapses.
The test on your own draft is to list your cast and write one sentence for each on what the story could not do without them. Any character whose sentence describes what they add instead of what they enable is a candidate for compression, and compressing three of them will usually fix a slow middle without you writing a single new scene.
Should you watch The Life Aquatic?
Yes, and be patient with it. The middle wanders and several characters go nowhere. Watch it for Murray, for the cutaway shot, and for the last fifteen minutes, which are the best thing Anderson has done and which almost nobody saw because they had already dismissed the film.
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