Wes Anderson has people fooled. The filmmaker behind Bottle Rocket, Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums has been hailed as a visionary and the voice of his generation, but as his popularity grows and Disney throws piles of money at him to make his new film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, it's becoming more and more clear that this particular emperor has no clothes.
Anderson's films have always been empty collections of quirks, but as his budgets have grown, so has his obsession with oddball minutiae, so much so that you suspect a piece of furniture in the background has gotten more careful consideration than such big-picture luxuries as plot and character. With corporate money backing him for Aquatic, Anderson has made something that's barely even a movie: It's just a bunch of quirks thrown together and projected on a screen.
Perhaps Anderson's best illusion comes in his casting. He puts actors who are either inherently fantastic or idiosyncratic on the screen, distracting his audience from the fact that their characters have no souls. Here, he works with a number of his favorite recurring players. The title character is played by Bill Murray, who worked with Anderson in both Rushmore and Tenenbaums. Murray's been experiencing quite the late-career renaissance, with deservedly acclaimed performances in Rushmore and Lost in Translation, and it'd be nice to report that his work as Steve carries the film, but he comes off as mostly flat.
Steve has a bit of a flat personality, though, as an oceanographic explorer clearly modeled after Jacques Cousteau, who makes his living peddling his very primitive-looking nature documentaries. He's remarkably sanguine about the death of his longtime partner, eaten by a mysterious creature Steve dubs the "jaguar shark," and vows revenge in the disinterested monotone that Murray uses throughout the film. Perfect for disconnected loners like Rushmore's Herman Blume and Translation's Bob Harris, Murray's lack of affect doesn't serve well for Steve, who's supposed to be passionate about the ocean and avenging his lifelong friend.
Steve's Capt. Ahab-like quest is complicated by the arrival of Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson, another Anderson regular), a pilot from Kentucky who may or may not be Steve's long-lost son. Ned tags along on the mission, fitting into Steve's ragtag crew that includes a German first mate (Willem Dafoe), a Portuguese crewman who sings David Bowie songs translated into his native language, a turban-wearing cameraman, a frequently topless "script girl," a gaggle of interns, and pregnant journalist Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett, still doing half of her Katharine Hepburn impression from The Aviator), who is chronicling Steve's descent into obsession.
Each character has a goofy name and a random goofy trait for no other discernible reason than to make the film seem unique and quirky. Never do you get the impression that these are real people with real feelings, even in the moments that should be the most emotionally affecting. Anderson never wastes an opportunity to distract the audience with his overly designed sets (one ridiculous sequence has Steve and Ned wandering through the entire ship, as the camera is pulled back just far enough for us to see that the rooms are artificial constructs) or his made-up aquatic animals, represented in animation created by Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick.
Why are all the fish animated? Why does everyone have names like "Oseary Drakoulias" and "Alistair Hennessey"? Why do we keep hearing David Bowie songs in Portuguese? Your guess is as good as mine, and probably as good as Anderson's, since the only reason seems to be to show off how different and clever Anderson can be, stuffing his film full of irrelevant eccentricities that do nothing to tell a story or create believable characters. In the past, there has sometimes been a sliver of humanity to Anderson's storytelling, but here there's none, perhaps thanks to the absence of Owen Wilson as co-writer (he's replaced by filmmaker Noah Baumbach).
Whatever the reason, The Life Aquatic is Anderson's least interesting film, and should serve as a demonstration of the vapidity of his so-called brilliance: cynical, worthless, arrogant showboating that prizes false cleverness over story and content, and mocks the audience along with the characters. With the spotlight shining on him brighter than ever, Anderson proves to be nothing more than a desperate pretender in auteur's clothing.