Life Aquatic

I find this a hard movie to rate. Maybe a second viewing would make it easier. It's a odd film: one of these low-key black humor films which is a mixture of drama and comedy. What set this apart were a few other shocking scenes of violence, something not normally in this type of movie. For a comedy, albeit a tongue-in-cheek one, that violence doesn't seem to fit, but it makes the film all the more intriguing.

At times I was totally bored with this movie and at other times fascinated. I know one thing: this is a bizarre story! That automatically means it's a good vehicle for Bill Murray, who excels at wacky characters, event he low-key ones as he sometimes plays (i.e. Lost In Translation, The Royal Tenebaums, etc.). Speaker of the latter, this movie was written and directed by Wes Anderson, the same man who did "Tenenbaums." If you saw that, you have an idea of what you might get here, although I thought Royal Tenenbaums was far funnier.

At 118 minutes, this a bit long for what it offers. I'd like to have seen it 15 minutes shorter with a tighter script. But it does offer some good photography in addition to the strange story. This movie, as they say, is not for all tastes.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is a beautiful film. I'm ashamed to say that the first time I rented it I popped it out of the player after only a couple of minutes. I must have been in the mood for an action flick at the time. I gave the movie a second chance recently and was impressed by this film.

The actors are at the top of their form. Cate Blanchett's character is beautiful, pregnant, fiercely independent, and yet vulnerable. Murray is revealing how broad his range is once again. He shocked me with his talent in the remake of Hamlet, impressed me with Lost in Translation, and now somehow has combined the putz he often plays with an extremely complicated character that few other actors could manage.

The comedy is fantastically funny and is a fresh change from the 'Oh no, I plugged up the toilet' humor that has been so prevalent recently. It's still ludicrous at times and yet the viewer welcomes it and enjoys it.

Overall, I gave it a 9 out of 10. I highly recommend it and wait to see how Bill Murray will impress us in the future.

Billy Mintsopoulos

I'm not generally a fan of Wes Anderson. He relies too heavily on the charm of detachment. Burton has this problem too, hidden under the humorous tone. The appeal is a generational thing and I guess I'm too old to simply find that enough.

But here, he does something different than what I have seen elsewhere from him. I think it is because the Owen influence is small here. The form is a movie about making a life which is a movie. Both the movie and the movie within have fantastic elements, but we do have a clear shift to brighter colors and crisper landscapes when within the inner world.

Its all based on synthetic notions of drama: love, purpose, worth. When you sneak up on things this way, you have to play a delicate game, one I think Wes usually flubs. You have to engage by setting a distance that is far enough from the norm that we as viewers can lean into it, and near enough to what we think of as real flesh that we want to.

Bill Murray doesn't understand this balance, because he's all about distance. Never mind, he's just an actor. So you select actors that try for the closeness. Dafoe and Blanchett get this. What they choose to do is simple: they form a real person and layer some cartoonish mannerisms on top. We see through the play and value the real underneath, where we cannot with Murray and Wilson.

Because the whole thing can blend together, we get a wonderful balance of this tension: engagement and studied apartness. I credit Anderson with maintaining this container. It works. And it works because he was smart. You can see that he understands this dynamic well enough to know that we will be impatient with his tricks for very long. So the movie changes tone as it moves along. It changes slowly with less emphasis on the personal abstraction and more on abstracting the physical: the ship, the rooms, beds, sub. It allows Cate to present her womb, which is quite a miracle.

If you read the trivia at IMDb, you find that many top actresses wanted this part. So it is pretty amazing that Cate's condition as a pregnant woman who knows how to turn herself inside out was able to have that condition become so central to the world we see.

This isn't quirky. This isn't comedy. This is extremely sensitive positioning of the audience to allow for deeper penetration. Its a triangulation of "Incident at Loch Ness" and "Cowards Bend the Knee ."

I felt blessed watching it.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Listen, it isn't the most artsy film on earth. It doesn't have the richest plot ever. What it has is Bill Murray and Owen Wilson teaming up with Wes Anderson to portray a wonderful story. To like any of those three involved is to like this film. Definitely worth 2 hours out of any life, unless you'll be dying in less than 2 hours. This movie signifies the new way of storytelling for movies to come for years. The days of the old-fashioned drama starring a powerful actor, supported by wonderful character actors is over. To be a good movie anymore, the lead must have the capability to play more than himself in real life (i.e. Bruce Willis is always Bruce Willis). Bill Murray fits the mold perfectly, as he portrays the washed-up sea adventurer. Not to mention the wonderful cast around him, the best performance coming possibly from Willem Dafoe (who is great in every movie he's in).

This Wes Anderson movie is very quirky but fans of Wes Anderson will not be disappointed. The movie is part a loving parody of Jacques Cousteau, part character study, with a lot of wit and understated acting. Beautifully shot, it is more complex and straightforward than some other Anderson movies, but still has a mesmerizing effect and grows on you upon repeated viewings. Justifiably a cult classic, it is perhaps not the best of Wes Anderson movies, but it is not the worst either, despite unjustly being panned by critics. If you have a functioning brain, give it a try.