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Rating: "Without lineage, no man can look at himself with love" (S. Paul)
"I hate all fathers and never wanted to be one" (S. Zissou)
After the estranged "The Royal Tenenbaums" ('01), Wes Anderson continues on his personal path of dismantling certain clichés and the languages that describe them with "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" ('04), a film partly shot in Italy - Cinecittà, Naples - and received with mixed reviews from critics and audiences.
That it was a film almost naturally destined to fail, despite the high-level cast, special effects, costumes, and the vaguely adventurous flavor of the narrative plot, becomes apparent, with the inevitable hindsight, when rethinking the development of the film itself, somewhat surprising compared to the apparent premises. Which, as I will attempt to clarify further below, does not imply that it is a bad film: instead, it should be considered as a small semi-forgotten masterpiece - some would say "minor" -, at least in my opinion and for the reasons I will try to clarify later.
"The Life Aquatic..." presents itself, tautologically, as an "adventure" film: Steve Zissou, a splendid and bewildered Bill Murray vaguely modeled on Jacques Cousteau, is an oceanographer and marine explorer who tries to combine, in his activity, science, dissemination, entertainment, marketing (films, posters, books, advertising, even the fabulous "Zissou Adidas"!). The death of his brotherly friend and colleague Esteban, devoured by a mysterious spotted shark (also known as the "jaguar shark"), hiding in the depths of the ocean, pushes Zissou toward his ultimate adventure: hunting the beast, leading his boat - the Belafonte - populated by utterly improbable characters, including a precise and diligent chief engineer who will be revealed to be a "former bus driver" (Willem Defoe), a wife "born rich and mean" but of crystalline intelligence, (Anjelica Houston), her "a bit gay" ex-husband and Zissou's arch-rival (Jeff Goldblum), a pregnant and anguished journalist (Cate Blanchett), a security officer who sings Bowie in Brazilian (Seu Jorge), video and audio technicians, frogmen, seven interns from the University of Northern Alaska working onboard for free in exchange for a certificate of attendance, financial partners, and, not least, an alleged secret son (Owen Wilson), a former pilot for Air Kentucky.
This leads to adventurous episodes akin to dime novels, where surreal interludes mix with maritime epic sprinkled with vintage modernity, culminating with the meeting/confrontation with the jaguar shark, where...
It should be noted that the exposition of the plot risks misleading the reader, and obviously the aspiring viewer, about the true nature of the film, which in reality overturns many hackneyed aspects of the adventure film, giving the title a more provocative than descriptive tone. The fact that the adventures are described as "aquatic", after all, almost suggests that they aim to plumb the depths of souls rather than those of the seas, where water is the very symbol of life, the liquid that makes up bodies and from which life originates (and the original title is, indeed, "The Life Aquatic...").
The same, mischievous, self-definition of the film is thus disavowed during the viewing of the work, where Anderson amuses himself by deconstructing the language and clichés typical of adventure films, and the novels that implicitly constitute their model, fragmenting and slowing down the plot almost to boredom, rendering the navigation of Zissou and company as a sort of crossing of eternally calm seas, where the real storms are within the minds of the characters, rather than tangible, even in the face of upheaval from pirates, marine beasts, a whirl of characters, and navigational and flight mishaps.
Indicative of this are the tendency for slow dialogues, the marked use of long takes and a montage that is never frantic, as is usual in the genre, but, on the contrary, very controlled, the ironic emphasis on the costumes and even the film's secondary characters, besides the meticulous definition of the interiors of the Belafonte, the inanimate protagonist of the film: it becomes almost a house - like the mansion in "The Royal Tenenbaums" - if not even the "theater" within which all the characters move, a paradoxically static place despite its constant movement, where time does not seem to genuinely pass.
Zissou's journey and his companions' can thus be read not so much as an adventurous path, but as an inner experience of loss and painful reconquest of affections, prompted by an actual bereavement (the death of Esteban) and other losses differently described throughout the story, from marital instability to mutual envies, to explicit and frustrated loves or subtly homosexual and repressed, to problematic maternity, finally to the never-desired, found, possibly lost paternity; the experience grows darker (like the sea depths upon which the ship superficially sails) as the film progresses, portraying the tensions, jealousies, resentments, and anxieties of various crew members, depicted almost as an imperfect occasional, alternative, unresolved, and failed family, a patriarchal paradigm it seeks to negate.
Faced with disappointments, the lack of acceptance from others and oneself, disaffection with one's work and fellow humans, a crisis with no apparent outlet except dissolution and death, Zissou is a character without a future, with a nihilistic and self-destructive stance, almost as if the longed-for encounter with the jaguar shark is a conscious attempt to face death and join his friend Esteban in Nothingness.
The encounter with the jaguar shark, however, loses its epic and resolutive character and, in a scene of rare beauty, becomes the keystone of Zissou's entire existence: born as a hope for revenge, matured as a desire to dissolve and an affirmation of existential failure, it reveals itself as an opportunity for rebirth and a paradoxical recovery of self-awareness and adventure.
The stunned amazement felt by Zissou and his companions when faced with the shark, pure beauty, and light in the darkness, seems to reconfirm a meaning to the explorer's life and, above all, recompose the solidarity and brotherhood of the crew members, and perhaps the lost sense of fatherhood, almost moving in the red carpet walk that concludes the film and the subsequent departure of the Belafonte, tinged with dream and hope, as confirmed incongruously by the shadow of the pipe smoker atop the ship.
The fact that everything happens accidentally, without cause-and-effect relationships and without any will of the protagonists, in the climate of rhapsodic madness characterizing the entire story, is perhaps the most successful metaphor of an aquatic and polymorphous life, where pains, joys, life, death, and rebirth coexist and mix continuously, in a bittersweet drifting suddenly redeemed by the enthusiasm and wonder of the child that Zissou finally carries on his shoulders.
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