WesFest Day 4: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Bill Murray, as Steve Zissou, in The Life Aquatic. Image courtesy of Prime Video.
I was trying to figure out an angle for this, and I thought I’d address it to you not just for our recent conversations about Wes Anderson – but also because The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou kind of reminds me of La Chimera now. How a man with too much character for his body convinces a ragtag group of seemingly lesser (but colourful) mortals to follow him on another blind escapade into nowhere.
Granted, Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is much more transparent about where the Belafonte, a research vessel, is headed and why. Zissou needs money and moral buy-in to launch back into the sea in search of a mysterious creature that he can’t prove exists, to either philanthropic or zoological societies or both. He makes that money back by returning with what are meant to be epic documentaries. Just before a lukewarm response to a latest screening, Zissou explains how the circumstantially named ‘Jaguar-Shark’ tore his best friend apart. He needs to return to the sea, to be funded for it, in part so he can enact revenge.
Do you see what I’m doing here? With the La Chimera comparison? I’m compelling you, Zissou-like, to invest a bag or two of sympathy on the slightly perilous expedition I promised earlier: making the case for the Wes Anderson anthology, with just Life Aquatic for starters, to represent the instruction manual for modern, sensitive masculinity.
I keep telling myself I’ve been to every Yorck theatre in the city, then it turns out there’s one more. Tai, a Berlin Bestie type of situation, waxed lyrical on the anthropological gymnastics of Sinners as we walked from Eisenacher Straße to the Odeon, on a rather Berlin-looking day. This made its green sign all the more heartwarming around 5pm, kind of like the feeling road travellers have when the sign of a gas station or a MacDonald’s suddenly lights up the night. I couldn’t help thinking that the Odeon looks exactly like the sort of place someone would screen a Wes Anderson movie. Nondescript, it sort of just sits there staring at light traffic all day, or perhaps past light traffic into space – contemplating the first sentence of a love letter to the movies. It looks tiny from the outside but seems to have a million seats on the in. Tai was still whispering to me about Sinners, as we waited for the non-cinematic trailers to do their thing, and out of nowhere challenged me to name every Wes Anderson flick ever made. I paused gorging on popcorn, missed two or three entries, not that you even care of course. Tai doesn’t either, not really, but says I remind him of an older brother who does. I think this is mostly a sentimental compliment.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little worried those first 45 minutes or so. Tai had said he could only see one Wes Anderson pic – the Odeon is running a kind of (egads!) WesFest – and was initially inclined towards The Royal Tenenbaums. I said statistically most WesHeads (egads!) would probably call Tenenbaums Anderson’s best picture, but I’d already seen it at least three times, and if you ask me Life Aquatic could arguably muscle its way into that top slot. (I personally believe this belongs to Rushmore, which last I checked is still uncomfortably hilarious.)
Like I said, beg pardon, I was worried. If you’re not a WesHead the technical whoosh and razzmatazz of Life Aquatic might not constitute much of a feast to indifferent eyes. Nevertheless it’s so damned gorgeous to look at, and (I may be wrong) uses significantly fewer model sets (part of the Wes aesthetic you so despise) than a lot of his modern works. Zissou and his crew beg to differ with one another in lush rooms hoarded to the brim with naval paraphernalia, and catch breathers above board with their weary faces cast lovingly against swathes of ocean blue. In the scene that introduces Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett), a tagging-along reporter from a taste-making magazine, Zissou and chums are navigating a beach full of glowing electric jellyfish. When the camera isn’t changing scene as if by balletic, visual punctuation (Anderson’s shots spin around, veer up and down, trample or stagger into one another), it’s alighting upon literal dream sequences.
But this isn’t what we’re here for. I digress, and I beg your pardon again.
Shortly before embarking on the quest to locate and maybe murder the Jaguar-Shark, a young pilot introduces himself to Zissou as his long-lost son, 30 whole years of age. We know by this point that Zissou is married to the sea, having been inattentive to a brilliant wife, so brilliant she might have been the true captain of the Belafonte all along, and who is now shacking up with a man Zissou calls his nemesis. I concede Anjelica Huston (as Eleanor Zissou) could be afforded significantly more screen-time, more moments with which to tear Zissou down to size with devastating pithiness. But when she does materialise she does so with the grace and purpose of a Greek goddess, and it is Zissou himself that admits the Belafonte wouldn’t have sailed so long without Eleanor’s invisible stewardship.
You know a little bit where I stand on this: from a critical perspective, I would like to see more women protagonists lead more Anderson projects as more than just lovers who alter the trajectory of egotistic buffoons. Not just venerated, though the gesture is sweet enough, as better halves who’ve tried and failed repeatedly to alert the male leads toward their hubris.
But that hubris, this is my point, is a hell of a starting point for helping men understand what it is the modern world requires of them. When Zissou learns he has a son, he seems like the second-last person on earth who should be informed he’s a father. He’s obsessed with his own legend, wastes a lot of time and money in pursuit of its shining hour, and has clearly hurt or disappointed many people along the way. He even duels, with this son, for the affections of a woman he ought be professionally attached to. (Ms. Winslett-Richardson, who tells Zissou he is too old for her, before Zissou volleys, “Well, you’re pregnant.”)
We sometimes meet Anderson’s problematic men (the quickest to mind being Gene Hackman’s patriarch in Tenenbaums) at exactly the point in their lives that they realise they are at risk of losing everything and everyone over a mistaken understanding of glory. Even if these men are themselves not self-reflective, Anderson’s stories purposely throw dissenters and dead-ends at them, to show how a certain modus operandi (emotionally) has effectively run out of gas. The white strands on Zissou’s beard tell us the man is running out of time, and that what choices he has left (as an explorer) need to be deliberated over with a different brand of gut feeling.
Over the course of the movie, he talks himself into the idea of actually being a father — in all seriousness re-names a 30-year old man, and duels with him for the affections of a woman already with child – whilst coming to terms with the notion that he’s been a terrible father to his crew. Tribulations come in the form of unrequited feelings (an Anderson staple), goofy pirate types (another), and a mutiny aboard the Belafonte (LOLS), which loses the unpaid assistance of several interns. In a moment of rare psychiatric clarity, Zissou says a good captain must ask himself certain questions. “Did I do something wrong? Was it my fault? Does everyone hate me now?” The self-interestedness in an Anderson man like Zissou is always measured just so we can realistically compute that it takes more than 2 movie hours for people to change. But my point is what if men asked themselves these questions, on Wall Street, in the White House, at dinner tables? This is the late stage of second-act Anderson, just before his third shows what happens when these very self-interested men, and boys, actually stop and hear themselves.
On a raid at an abandoned island hotel, it all smacks Zissou in the ass when he falls down a flight of stairs. He tells Vikram, his camera operator, to keep the tape rolling – so he can deliver a sad, sorry speech about being washed up, a fool, and with no place else to take what had appeared to be impenetrable savvy. I know what it’s like to be that man, on his ass, on that floor, and I shed a real tear for that poor bastard. Because he finally got it.
Before the Life Aquatic’s big set-piece, Zissou travels up a mountain to sort of confess himself to Eleanor. She’s framed magnificently in the intricate design of a gate before she lets him in. Zissou says to her, “I don’t mind having a son – I just don’t feel it, you know?” Half an hour later, he shows the young man (Ned, played by Owen Wilson) a letter he now recalls receiving from a young fan who wrote him several years ago. The child adulates the big, foolish myth Zissou has built, and ends the note saying wouldn’t it be cool if we could breathe underwater.
I had to reach out for Tai’s wrist, I swear, just to handle all that vulnerability. All that sea.
