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Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, TheOne of the first generation of 'Saturday Night Live' alumni to make it on the big screen, the early trajectory of Bill Murray's career saw him employing his mastery of comic cynicism as Ghostbusters' Dr Peter Venkman and Groundhog Day's Phil Connors. His 50s have brought a new maturity, demonstrated by his performance as the jaded Bob Harris in Lost In Translation. And he's already clicked with Wes Anderson's idiosyncratic style from his supporting role in The Royal Tenenbaums. It's a shame then, that even with his implicitly amusing persona and increasingly hangdog face, he can't quite bring Steve Zissou to life.
Zissou is an eccentric take on Jacques Cousteau, a man who has explored the world's oceans and made a career from hit documentaries based on his adventures. But Steve's Team Zissou hasn't had "a hit documentary in nine years". Worse still, he's been hit by tragedy. While making the latest instalment of 'The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou', the documentary series-within-a-film, Steve's lifelong partner Esteban (Cassell) is killed by a mysterious creature.
"Esteban was eaten," Steve wails in the documentary. "Is he dead?" asks engineer Klaus (Dafoe). The film certainly has its amusing moments of dialogue, but the script, by Anderson and Noah Baumbach, never really flies. That's not to say the film fails, as the shortcomings are compensated for by a splendid ensemble. Anderson pushes the distinctive reality of Tenenbaums even further, into a fabulously realised concoction that's part 1960s retro, part modern sensibilities. The zoological oddities encountered by Team Zissou are brought to life by the distinctive stop-motion animation of Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Monkeybone).
This amount of stylisation endangers the film: Team Zissou's world is self-consciously whimsical. Almost every character is an eccentric, bar the poor interns, who Steve bullies ("Hey, intern, get me a Campari", "Intern, make me a latte"). Anderson packs the film with novelty and detail. Team member Pel?© (Jorge, City Of God) plays Brazilian versions of Bowie songs; the team's ship, the Belafonte, is revealed as a cutaway set; or the ephemera of Team Zissou's past glory, like Zissou edition Adidas trainers or Zissou fruit machines. Some of this does an effective job of creating a credible but hermetic world, but some belabours it.
Steve is self-serving and naive, but not so much that he doesn't realise he's largely washed-up. He's propelled by his ego, by a lifetime of adulation. This self-regard is punctured not only by his wife Eleanor (Houston) leaving him - and going to stay in the villa of her ex-husband and his ex-roommate, Alistair Hennessey (Goldblum) - but also by the sharp attitude of plummy British journalist Jane Winslett-Richardson (Blanchett). Steve was Jane's idol, but on joining Team Zissou for its latest voyage, she sees through his bluster immediately. Steve's self-possession is also buffeted by the arrival of Ned Plimpton (Wilson, nominally playing against type: "I don't usually try grass"), a man who may or may not be Steve's son.
Steve is on the trail of his very own Moby Dick, the "shark, or whatever it is" that killed Esteban. The bulk of the film involves the Belafonte tracking the shark and the team doing dives. During this time, the glue of the family unit comes increasingly unstuck. This entails the personal problems of team members coming to the fore, with rivalry between Ned and Steve's other surrogate son Klaus, further rivalry between Ned and Steve for Jane's affections, and beyond even that the rivalry between Steve and Hennessey, who pops up on his vast, glossy, somewhat camp ship.
The comedy lacks the dark delights and surprises of Anderson's previous two films, which he co-wrote with Wilson. But ultimately, the drama does come through, and the whole just about hangs together. Its eccentricity might feel laboured, and even old hand Murray struggles to bring the flawed hero to life, but this still manages to surface as an imaginative, refreshingly odd and endearingly benign film.
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