Seven Oaks Magazine.

While discussing our own neo-auteur theory of film, a colleague summed up why promising young directors, after putting out a few good features, stumble and fall and make a terrible movie.

“When a wunderkind starts to believe his own hype, is when bad films are made.” I think I would add that the economy required for the smaller budgeted, earlier films is a boon rather than a restriction, because egos are kept in check and directors are forced to corral their bloated visions. It’s only when studios think they have a sure bet on their hands does the largesse begin to flow and a director is given free reign.

Both seem to be the case in Wes Anderson’s latest effort, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. It seems that this wunderkind has started to believe in the genius of his ideas and has been given the budget to cram every little fantasy, every visual gag he had ever scribbled down when brainstorming pretentiously over a cup of coffee. The Life Aquatic is an unfunny, distended mess, and would have been one of the worst films of the year had 2004 not included such gems as White Chicks, New York Minute or Meet the Fockers.

Anderson mainstay Bill Murray plays Steve Zissou, a less talented, less suave Jacques Cousteau-like oceanographer and filmmaker, fighting through the depression and torpor of a making a decade of terrible films. Steve Zissou’s crew is a multicultural mishmash of specialists who guide the good ship Belafonte into every adventure and misstep. The ship’s name, incidentally, is a terrible riff off the Cousteau legend – his ship was called the Calypso and Harry Belafonte was a famous calypso singer.

Zissou’s colleague and best friend Esteban du Plantier (Seymour Cassel) was killed by a jaguar shark “or creature” when the crew were making their last film. He now plans to hunt down and kill the shark and film this adventure. Of course, this gives him a chance to ruminate as a modern day Ahab, but not for too long, as he must deal with the sudden appearance Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), who may or may not be his son, his wife, played with annoying, gothic boredom by Angelica Huston, and capture a new, hopefully exciting adventure on film. Things get complicated when pregnant Oceanographer Today journalist Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett) comes to write a cover story and is caught in a half-hearted love triangle with Ned and Steve.

I don’t think I’ve even mentioned half the subplots Aquatic tries to develop. Certainly, more are left in stasis or to die than are cleaned up in the end. This is a mess of a film, so convoluted and top heavy that even the actors seem to realize it. Murray’s indolence, endearing and wonderful in his other two turns in Anderson films, is artificially shoe-horned into a character that requires none. Huston, once sweet, gentle and loving in The Royal Tenebaums, looks like she would rather be someplace else, and inhabits her role like an actress who regrets agreeing to the part before reading the script. Owen Wilson, who for the first time does not share a writing credit with Anderson, and it shows, seems dulled, and completely devoid of the sparkling insouciance that defined his characters in Bottle Rocket and The Royal Tenebaums.

Who could blame them? It seems a half-good idea – sending up the Jacque Cousteau epoch – has been buried under a pile of fast and ugly quirkiness that is simply there for its own sake. What separated Anderson from his precocious, less successful counterparts was the genuine heart his films had and the emotions they created. Now given the ability to indulge in his peculiar worlds, he seems lost in them, and seems to have lost the need to tell a story. He seems to be taking his audience members on a tour of the toys he can now afford, rather than using them to make something interesting. In doing so, he scuttles the illusion of the world he is trying to create, not that he paid much attention to it anyways. The production values of The Life Aquatic are terrible, from terrible photography, cheesy special effects and awful sound. All of this creates a feeling akin to being unable to get off an amusement park ride – endless, painful, microcosmic and brutally unfunny.

Unbelievably unfunny, in fact, especially for a film that intends to be a light-hearted, satirical romp through the adventurer’s world, so unfunny that even the chortling Anderson fanboy two rows behind me was forcing his laughter by the end.

My expectations for The Life Aquatic were high, considering the wonderment I still get from his previous three works. Instead, I found myself questioning the pleasures I had derived from them. In fear, after coming coming home from the theatre, I put on my copy of The Royal Tenenbaums, and tried to relive the magic I experienced not three years earlier. It was still there, and I was still enthralled by the characters and their adventures in Anderson’s stylized Manhattan.