Of Gimmickry and Gadgets: ‘The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou’ (2004)
It’s customary, when writing a retrospective essay about The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, to mention up top the freak indifference that greeted its theatrical release — indifference that soon gave way to the film’s current status of cult-classichood. But this interpretation is valid only if you look at the initial box-office numbers — $34 million internationally off of a $50 million budget — and somewhat less valid when you consider that in many ways the film came into the world a cult phenomenon fully formed.
I’d be interested to know just how much revenue was generated from Zissou swag in the movie’s initial release — how much from shirts, red knit caps, blue-and-yellow Adidas. Certainly not enough to earn out the film’s budget, I know, but it must have been a lot. The Life Aquatic was from the very beginning so much more than a movie, it’s no wonder many insisted on claiming it was something less.
Many critics were reacting to the film’s fastidious concern for visual detail, as if careful composition should be considered anything less than a virtue in filmmaking. Even the film’s defenders say the plot meanders, but I never noticed; I’ve always been too engrossed in these characters and the world Wes Anderson created for them to live in. He had a lot of help, as always, but the vision was his, and it never ceases to amaze me how much contempt and resentment that vision inspires. From the moment of its release, The Life Aquatic was on trial by people who’d already made up their minds, sight unseen, that this was a film whose human elements could never rise to the level of the gee-whiz gimmickry of its gadgets.
“Let me tell you about my boat.”
This is Bill Murray as Zissou introducing the Belafonte, the retired U.S. Navy sub-hunter that has served him so well in his decades of oceanographic documentary filmmaking. We see the ship in dollhouse cutaway as Zissou gives us a tour of its well-appointed compartments: the sauna (with Swedish masseuse on staff); the place “where we do all our experiments and science projects and so on”; the kitchen (“which contains probably some of the most technologically advanced equipment on the ship”); the research library (“with a complete first-edition set of the Life Aquatic Companion Series”); the film-editing suite; the observation bubble (“which I thought of in a dream actually”) deep in the nose of the vessel; the engine room; and, finally, “Topside we’ve got the bridge, the mini-sub, an old chopper, and all kinds of radar and sonar and underwater movie gadgets.”
The Belafonte has sailed fairer seas, and Zissou has seen better days. His documentaries of oceanographic exploration, once so vital and popular, have lately only sunk him in debt. He’s getting older, in his 50s now. His best friend and cinematographer recently died — killed, he claims, by a jaguar shark that his camera didn’t quite pick up. When our story begins, Zissou is showing this incomplete footage at the fictional Loquasto International Film Festival, vowing to all present that he will find the shark and kill it, and that this will be his sequel, the capstone to a capacious career.
Anderson named this fanciful festival after a production designer, Santo Loquasto. That’s appropriate, as no film ever had more reverence for the power of production design. We’ve already talked about the boat, which Anderson and his co-writer, Noah Baumbach, claim preceded the idea for the story itself — the story emerging from the boat as if birthed from it. In addition to this, there is the Rome setting, the spiffy aquamarine-blue uniforms of Team Zissou, and the colorful stop-motion marine creatures.
Those creatures were created by Henry Selick, who’d previously done the animation for The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), and, after The Life Aquatic, would get the chance to write and direct his own film, which became Coraline (2009). One stop-motion puppet — that of the jaguar shark itself — is the largest ever created, three meters in length, and was filmed upside-down so that it would seem to be responding to underwater gravity.
Other invented species rendered in stop-motion animation include sugar crabs, crayon ponyfish, backflipping frogs, electric jellyfish, fluorescent snapper, albino scouts, wild snow mongooses, puffer fish, and (in a deleted scene) red-tail envelope fish. “The challenge,” admitted editor David Moritz, “was to not overuse them, to not make it something that seemed either too cute or manipulative on our part.” I’d say that challenge was met successfully. When the creatures do appear, they manage to surprise and delight, and remind us of the enthusiasm for nature’s wonders that has inspired Zissou all these years.
This kind of one-foot-in-the-real-world surreality is prevalent throughout. David Bowie songs are sung diegetically in Portuguese by one of the crewmembers, played by Seu Jorge, who strums them out on an acoustic guitar and does double duty as a crewmember with no lines. The costumes were imagined into being by Milena Canonero, who’d gotten her start on Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1972) and gone on to nothing but success from there. And Mark Mothersbaugh’s score is rendered primarily in plinky synth-sounds, made Casio-keyboard-like at Anderson’s explicit request. When the crew lands at Ping Island to storm the old Hotel Citroen and rescue the bond-company representative (Bud Cort), the music they do so by goes from all-synthesiser to full-throated orchestral. The song itself remains the same, but its expression has been totally recontextualized, intensified and heightened to signal the change from safe whimsy to dangerous action.
You can’t say The Life Aquatic is a film afraid to take on the big themes: fatherhood/paternity, ambition/failure, vengeance/forgiveness, marital love, jealousy, motherhood. When Ned confronts Steve with the claim that he just might be his son, the movie handles the moment with utmost soul and grace, as we see Steve go topside for contemplation in a slow-mo interlude accompanied by Bowie’s “Life On Mars” (the original version). A short time later, Ned asks Steve why he’s always avoided the issue; when Steve answers, “Because I hate fathers, and I never wanted to be one,” the moment couldn’t possibly be more poignant or penetrating. Some of us can testify to the precise truth of this sentiment.
Much of the movie’s profoundest psychological subtlety occurs in passing. It occurs when longtime team member Klaus (Willem Dafoe) is so jealous of Ned’s relationship with Steve, he punches him in the face; when Ned and Jane (Cate Blanchett) read to the latter’s unborn baby as if in the mutual hope that it’ll turn out better-reared than Ned has been; when Steve is humiliated by the overheard ridicule about his fallen fortunes at the explorers’ club; when Alistair Hennessy (Jeff Goldblum at his absolute Goldblumiest) manages to seem both compassionate and contemptuous when he reminds Steve of their shared past.
I could go on, but why spell out so much of a movie that thrives on its ambiguity? Don’t forget that this is a movie whose two central plot points — the actions of the jaguar shark and Steve’s paternity of Ned — are not just left unresolved but whose irresolution is a frequent source of humor among the characters.
The Life Aquatic is steeped in cinematic homage, even by the standards of Anderson’s other work. There’s the Loquasto International Film Festival, already mentioned here as a likely nod to the movie’s elaborate production design. There’s the squarish-framed glasses of Oseary Drakoulias (Michael Gambon), consciously modeled on those of Sergio Leone. When the crew of the Belafonte plans mutiny, they do so in a kitchen constructed and shot identically to that in The Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). There’s a very clear homage to the shot in Star Wars (1977) when C3PO is spied through tinted, digital-readout binoculars, and to Altman’s long-range zooms from establishing shot to medium, as we notice Zissou on the deck to the lab of Operation Hennessy. And what is Bud Cort’s very presence here if not an homage to the New Hollywood of the 1960s and ’70s? (Cort starred in Harold and Maude (1971) as well as Altman’s Brewster McCloud (1970).)
This is all very fun, of course, but where Anderson creates the most fun — for himself and for us — is in alluding to the real-life filmmaking icon who presides over the whole thing.
On the film’s Criterion commentary track, Anderson and Baumbach talk about their early fascination with Jacques Cousteau, who was, says Baumbach, “always an interesting figure to us, because as kids we idolized him and watched his shows. He was one of those characters who seemed just like a star incarnate in some way.” They wanted Zissou to “be a kid’s idea of what an adult is, or what a celebrity is,” and so it’s only natural that they’d look to Cousteau for their template.
All those comfortable compartments within the Belafonte — they stand in direct reference to Cousteau and his Calypso. (Harry Belafonte, of course, is perhaps the most famous singer of calypso music.) The Calypso may not have had a sauna, as the Belafonte does, but it did have a tanning bed. And the Belafonte’s kitchen, containing “probably some of the most technologically advanced equipment on the ship,” would have found its equal on the Calypso, aboard which the epicurean pleasures of fine-dining and wine-tasting were regularly pursued (although Zissou prefers Campari, on the rocks).
There are biographical similarities too. Steve Zissou’s chaotic familial circumstances were more than equaled by those of Cousteau, who kept two separate families, one entirely secret from another. Anderson and Baumbach, constrained by the plausibility demands imposed by fiction, could allow their man no such extravagance, but what they came up with is perfectly strange enough. One of Cousteau’s sons also died in a helicopter accident, just as Ned Zissou does here.
The blue suits and red knit caps are obviously modeled on those of Team Cousteau (even if the blue is of a more cinematic aquamarine), and something similar can be said for everything from the film stock to the narration to the approach to subject matter of the documentaries within the movie. Even if Anderson hadn’t said so, we’d know that these miniature films-within-the-film were “more than a little” inspired by those of Cousteau.
It’s not the first time Cousteau has appeared in a Wes Anderson film. His portrait presides over two members of the Bottle Rocket (1996) gang at a party, and, much more significantly, he provides the words that set Max (Jason Schwartzman) in Rushmore (1998) on his quest in pursuit of Miss Cross (Olivia Williams). Max finds the words in reproduced handwriting in the Cousteau book Diving for Sunken Treasure, and they go like this: “When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.”
And yet, there are still those who wish Anderson had kept The Life Aquatic to himself. Even as their numbers proportionally decrease and their voices muffle, the phenomenon continues to perplex. For Anderson to explore family troubles, thwarted ambition, and fallen fortunes, and to do so through the life and work of another filmmaker — a filmmaker not at all like himself, superficially — and therefore give his movie its quintessential movieness as well as all the accouterments of high-seas adventure: it’s the perfect stroke of ingenuity, maybe the greatest stroke in a career strewn with such strokes.
The movie has a lot to say, and manages to say it in just under two hours. It’s packed with wonders like the sea is, which is what Bill Murray was talking about when he said, “It’s got everything — this movie really has everything. I’ve never been in a movie that has so much content.” Among all the many things the movie has is real soul and melancholy, which of course didn’t stop many critics from dismissing the whole thing as callow, even adolescent in its concerns. Instead of responding to what was on the screen before them, they responded to their preconceived notion of what a tricked-out Wes Anderson film with so many doohickeys must mean. Only a truly callow person could fail to perceive the pain in The Life Aquatic.
Anderson has admitted to sometimes worrying he might be pushing things too far, by inhabiting an artificial physical world with naturalistic acting. But a movie that carries such heavy emotional content, if it didn’t have these whimsical flourishes — as well as the eye-popping color scheme and mise-en-scene — would be nearly unbearable. It would be one of those maudlin movies that do no favors to anyone except those who like to wallow in misery, their own and others’. In a world this carefully crafted and cultivated, however — and in a movie this playfully presented — the authentic emotions are allowed to stand in sharp relief, and comprise the picture that satisfyingly stays in our heads long after.
