The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Employing, again, the ironic tone of his previous works, director Anderson tells the story of oceanographer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray), shaped, no doubt about it, by the figure of Jacques Cousteau.

Zissou and his team's documentaries have lost the interest oftheir public, hence the attempt to regain their glory days with a new project: a sort of personal vendetta against a murderer shark that ate one of Steve's most intimate work collaborators.

So far it sounds like a passionate personal drama, a kind of Captain Achab chasing Moby Dick. However, in the restless hands of Wes Anderson, this material becomes something else: an ensemble of comedy in a cold humor, in which, more than open jokes, there is an ingenious ironic tone that runs from start to finish.

The plot is rolled out by the characters and the links established between them. The story takes its time to introduce each of Zissou's team members.

Always with humor and irony, in each passage of the film the viewer is preparing for the big journey ahead. In the middle of this all, Zissou is found by his only son, Ned (Owen Wilson), to whom he had never wanted to get close. So Zissou invites him to be part of the Belafonte crew, the team’s boat.

Already in the Belafonte, conflicts and relationships between the characters start to evolve: Wes Anderson chooses the way of humor to show their fears, beliefs and insecurities, especially with regards to father and son. Of all the characters, the director is responsible to say something, to make them dialogue with the viewer so that he himself can complete their stories, their problems and understand why they act how they act.

However, the use of humor does not exclude the use of other tools to bring aesthetic and narrative images of what happens. The director stands out precisely because of his sensitivity in understanding what he is asking out every moment of this movie: he understands his characters, what happens, what they want, what they cannot do and, depending on the different situations that arises, he uses the resource which, as appropriate, seems the only possibility.

Not all shots always hit the target, but when they do they manage to make understandable and elaborate scale of the movie's purposes. Nothing left to chance here: the neglected and improvised course of its images have a visual and narrative purpose calculated to seek and achieve a comic effect. The idea is to connect with the narrative flow and let go.

Director: Wes Anderson

Writers: Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach

Stars: Bill Murray, Owen Wilson and Anjelica Huston