Bill Murray's face: so droll, so deadpan, so subtly eloquent of a hyper-satirical sensibility to everything around him. He is an Easter Island statue of hip comedy, and now age has added melancholy to the mix and even a certain grumpy vulnerability, a hint that under the cynicism and pessimism there's an urgent need to be loved.
Sofia Coppola brilliantly exploited the resource that is Bill Murray's face in Lost in Translation, but no one has done more to cultivate it than Wes Anderson, who cast Murray as the depressed older guy in his high-school comedy Rushmore, gave him a cameo in The Royal Tenenbaums, and did so much to create the late period in Murray's career.
Murray is the star of Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic and he hardly needs to crack an expression playing Steve Zissou, the autocratic oceanographer and has-been star of his own self-produced marine documentaries. Zissou is a weird mixture of Jacques Cousteau, Captain Kirk and Captain Bligh, but mainly the French legend Cousteau, to whose calmly paced and lugubriously narrated television shows the movie is a lovingly detailed tribute.
Like the dysfunctional Tenenbaums, the Zissou crew is family, a family that doesn't see anyone from the outside world and has developed its own inbred habits and mannerisms. The family's kit, craft and uniform are quaintly marooned in the 1960s of Cousteau, while Zissou's hated enemy and rival explorer Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum) luxuriates in state-of-the-art gadgetry. Willem Dafoe plays Zissou's trusty crewmember Klaus; Anjelica Huston is his semi-estranged wife Eleanor, "the brains behind Team Zissou"; and Owen Wilson is aboard as Ned, a huge fan of Zissou and also his illegitimate son.
The captain, with his old-fashioned ways, is pretty much washed up in the modern undersea world. But just as his career is about to go under, Zissou outrages naturalists everywhere with a quixotic new project. Team Zissou's much-loved cinematographer Esteban (Seymour Cassel) was eaten by a rare jaguar shark. So Team Zissou is going to track down this shark - and kill it. "For revenge," as Zissou crisply announces to his astonished public. This exciting mission is to be chronicled by a frightfully British magazine writer Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett), on whom Zissou naturally develops a monumental crush.
This is one of the most thoroughly and elaborately designed movies I have ever seen - even more so than Anderson's last film. That was credited to a different production designer, so the look and feel of The Life Aquatic, drenched in knowing eccentricity, can only be Anderson's own vision. He really does create an all-encompassing world of wackiness. The design of Zissou's rickety-rackety ship, the Belafonte, is a work of art in its own right. The captain takes us on a guided tour, and the ship's various cabins and state-rooms are laid open to us in cross-section. If The Life Aquatic were a prog-rock concept album (and in a way it is), then the map of this beautiful and strange ship would open out on a double-gatefold.
If only it were a bit funnier. It is such a brilliant idea, and everything looks so great, especially the way the film is constructed on Cousteau-esque lines, with the calm deliberation of a nature documentary from a more innocent age. There is an extraordinary, surreal sequence in which Zissou has to rescue a crew member from a pirate Filipino gang holed up in a ruined, deserted hotel on one of the "Bing Islands". This scene culminates in a chaotic firefight (Team Zissou are routinely issued with Glocks) and the zane factor simply goes through the roof. It really is one for connoisseurs of high comedy, but the characters and plot never quite take on a real life of their own.
Perhaps it is obtuse to complain about this, considering its stoned, glassy-eyed immobility is an undeniable part of the film's charm. Despite some wildly dramatic happenings, Anderson puts himself at one comic remove from any sense of action and danger, humorously loyal like a Zissou crew member to Zissou's tatty, unsexy world of scientific detachment. It might also be something to do with the fact that Wilson has not actually worked on the script, and for once his performance has maybe a teaspoonful too much smirking conceit. Having said that, there is one superbly funny stretch of dialogue, when Zissou surfaces in his scuba kit, having just witnessed Esteban's horrific death thousands of feet below, and screams up through the churning froth to his uncomprehending crew: "Esteban's been eaten!" "Whaat? Esteban's been bitten?" "No, eaten!" "You mean, swallowed whole?" "No! CHEWED!"
In a rare moment of father-son intimacy, Ned reminds Zissou of the fan letter he wrote him when he was just 12 years old, and of a question he asked. Did Zissou ever wish he could breathe underwater? His answer was yes, always (underlined), and the exchange is a poignant expression of distance and inadequacy. The Life Aquatic is immersed in its own sea of comic detail and it too cannot quite breathe underwater. The weightless comedy of quirkiness offers its own compensations.