How many leagues was that again?
Having finally got over my month-long head cold we thought it was safe to go to the pictures. On offer: The Aviator, Constantine, House of Flying Daggers, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Plus some other crap we didn't care about.
Obviously Micky didn't want to see anything with Hell Sequence Unit in the credits, and I hadn't had any coffee so the Aviator was out. We'd both been a bit underwhelmed by Hero recently, which was nice enough but didn't touch us in special ways. That just left Life Aquatic.
I hadn't heard anything about it at all until I saw a poster at a local indie cinema - this made me think it was a Disneyesque family underwater adventure film.
Which just goes to show how stupid I am. Wes Anderson directing Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Angelica Huston, Willem Dafoe AND MORE! (OK, and Michael Gambon and some other excellent but less famous supporting cast types.) Luckily I'd watched the extremely funny trailer a while back and seen the light.
You might want to go and watch the trailer too: Life Aquatic trailer
Pretty good, huh? And it doesn't even have all the best bits, although the helmet antenna sequence is quite high in my estimation. Not really surprising that it's so good, since this is basically a Royal Tenenbaums take on the Jacques Cousteau story. And the Royal Tenenbaums is easily one of the best films of the last few years.
So why did we enjoy Life Aquatic so much, despite its retreading of much the same creative path as the previous movie? Partly it must be the premise: An aging semi-amateur marine documentarist (who hasn't made a good movie in ten years) returns to the sea to kill the Jaguar Shark which ate his best friend. With dynamite. Stacked up against estranged father fakes illness to make up with his family it's looking pretty good so far. Although there's a fairly strong strand of broken family brought back together by adversity in Life Aquatic too.
It has to be said that mostly it's the same things that worked in the Royal Tenenbaums working again. There's a really good ensemble cast, with even minor characters well developed (the rivalry between Willem Dafoe's perfect neurotic German and Zissou's maybe-son Owen Wilson is particularly fine.) The set designs are absolutely wonderful, with Zissou's house, equipment, ship, helicopter, telephones, and book collection all stuck between the late '60s and early '70s, and labelled in dymo tape. The telephones are especially worthy of a mention, with a speakerphone being approximated by an acoustic coupler attached to an aging loudspeaker which looks suspiciously bakelite-ey.
Likewise, the soundtrack is worthy of mention. Crista gave me a copy of the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack a couple of Christmases ago, and I adore it. The Life Aquatic is accompanied about half the time by Portugese translations of David Bowie songs, sung by a Team Zissou member and accompanied on acoustic guitar. Shades of the bit in Master and Commander where Aubrey and Maturin's music in the cabin moves out through the windows and into the soundtrack. As if this weren't surreal enough, a few additional tracks are lifted from Inner Space, a real-life oceanographic documentary, and not Innerspace, that micro submarine movie from the '80s, as I had first supposed.
The so-called 'helmet song' by Mark Mothersbaugh is distressingly catchy casio music as well.
You can get quite a good feel for the style of the movie here: Life Aquatic website
Warning: A few minor plot spoilers might lurk in the next couple of paragraphs, waiting to bite the unwary.
Also serving well is the bookended narrative structure - there isn't the narration this time, but the film comes across as a fly on the wall documentary, and the presentation is in fact framed by screenings of two of Zissou's documentaries, appalling cuts and yellow title text proudly flaunted. The emotional tone of the film is similar but the ending is somehow lighter than the Royal Tenenbaums, despite having many the same sort of things happening. Perhaps it's the unending barrage of surrealism taking the sting out of the sadder events?
The reconciliation between Zissou and his arch rival, the 'only partly gay' and rather better funded Captain Hennessy (played by Jeff Goldblum doing his Jeff Goldblum thing) is a bit forced - it works well enough in the circumstances of the plot but I was enjoying the rivalry more. Likewise the end shot of the team running joyfully along feels unlikely, but it's fine as a credit sequence.
Phew. You're safe now. Come back.
Finally, and just to take the sheen off, the plot development isn't as coherent as it could be - Team Zissou plunges from one scrape to another without all that much to link them (although the links are usually there if you pay attention - there aren't really plot holes as such.) I didn't mind this because it suited the fragmentary style of the fake documentary. To me, they're just cuts. Other reviews seem to think it gets in the way, but they're probably overstating the point.
In summary, go and see this film. It's brilliant, I haven't sniggered so much in ages, although there were others in the cinema who didn't get it. Don't be like them, no one will respect you. And how can you pass on something with such wonderfully fake CGI marine life I don't know.
I'm off to buy a pair of speedos and a red woolly hat.