E-Mail This Article to a Friend Life is but a dream Steve Zissou shares the rapture of the deep BY PETER KEOUGH
	The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Directed by Wes Anderson. Written by Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach. With Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Anjelica Huston, Jeff Goldblum, Michael Gambon, Seu Jorge, Bud Cort, and Seymour Cassel. A Touchstone Pictures release (118 minutes). At the Boston Common, the Fenway, the Kendall Square, and the Circle/Chestnut Hill and in the suburbs.
	The life cinematic with Wes Anderson NEW YORK — "I find failure more interesting, more appealing than success." So says Wes Anderson, director and co-writer of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, at a press junket for the film at a Lower Manhattan hotel. It’s a surprising sentiment coming from a filmmaker who’s rocketed to success, with ever escalating budgets (from the shoestring Bottle Rocket to the $50 million Life Aquatic), and has a repertory company of A-list actors willing to work for him for peanuts in film after film. Life Aquatic is the story of an Jacques Cousteau–like oceanographer who, Anderson points out, is "just a filmmaker" like himself but one who, at midlife, feels washed up and directionless. The film, both forward- and backward-looking, recalls 8-1/2. "We’re big Fellini fans," says co-writer Noah Baumbach, acknowledging the reference. But Anderson, who’s just 35 and has just four films under his belt, is not Steve Zissou. Neither is Bill Murray, though Anderson had him in mind for the role back when the actor starred in his 1998 film Rushmore. Anderson, like Sofia Coppola in last year’s Lost in Translation, seems to have tapped into Murray at a midlife-crisis moment. Actually, Murray says, he’s already experienced that moment. "I thought about this a few years ago, like, ‘Well, do I want to be like a big movie star?’ And I didn’t. I decided I wanted to live my life, and at the same time I’d take these jobs where you don’t necessarily get paid a lot of money but you work with people that are good and you do what you want to do. I figured, ‘You know, maybe one of these is going to hit one day, and I’ll get whatever I need in terms of being noticed.’ And damned if this last movie [Lost in Translation] didn’t really do that. I like working that way. I don’t like to feel the pressure of having to be the biggest star in the world. I don’t want to feel desperate. I don’t wanna be a guy in a bar drinking and going, ‘Where the hell am I gonna go?’ It’s okay. I’ve had a great run." He adds, "And if I even changed careers, that would be an adventure too," citing a lifelong desire to write plays. Anderson is like Zissou in his ability to inspire a camp of followers, actors, and other talented folk who’ll work with him again and again, no matter how bizarre the adventure. "I have a lot of faith in him," Murray says. "We’ve become friends. I don’t need a lot of explanation for things, and if I feel I need something explained, I ask. The rehearsal on this movie was we went on a boat from Anzio to Ponza, and he just read the script to me. And I sat there, sunbathing. It was kind of like a fairy tale, kind of like a night-night bedtime story. We didn’t even finish the script. When I got there, I just felt like, ‘Ah, that’s enough.’ " "We all like to be recognized. And we all like to be appreciated," says Anjelica Huston, who’s on her second Anderson movie (after starring in The Royal Tenenbaums, she plays Eleanor Zissou, Steve’s estranged wife and the reputed brains behind his operation). "Once you realize you’re somebody’s taste, you work all the harder for them. I think at this point I’d do practically anything for Wes. I’d walk the plank for Wes." She notes similarities in certain strong-willed directors, from Anderson back to her father, John Huston. "They don’t really consort. The great directors that I’ve known always stand a little apart from their casts. Wes is somebody who likes to get in there, he’s a social guy, but he takes his time, and he’s incredibly well prepared. He also has a very definite idea of what he wants." Owen Wilson, a regular co-writer and actor in Anderson’s films who here plays Steve’s son, Ned, says that he often improvises in other director’s films but not Anderson’s: "Wes is pretty focused on getting it exactly how he wants it." Murray too is an inveterate ad-libber, but he says, "It’s nice to have a script that’s so well written that I don’t have to improvise. I used to have to rewrite whole movies." Anderson is similarly demanding of his audience, says stop-motion animator Henry Selick, who created the film’s fanciful sea creatures. "He was fine if people knew they weren’t real, but he wanted people to desire that they be real. He wants his audience to work a little, to participate, to make something come to life." — Gary Susman

Wes Anderson has cut all contact with the world as we know it, and not a moment too soon. At a time when bio-pics and documentaries dominate the screen, at least one filmmaker remains in touch with the notion that movies can be a waking dream. (Not a nightmare, which is David Lynch’s department.) And after all, it’s Christmas, dammit. We need an escape, if only to the playful depths of a determinedly gentle subconscious.

In its subtle violations of the laws of physics and logic, its abrupt close-ups of surreal details, its fusion of elements of fear and desire, The Life Aquatic blithely imitates many of the mechanics of dreaming. Like dreams, too, it confronts the anxieties of mortality and of unfulfilled, and fulfilled, desire. But as an added bonus, this is a shared dream, "with" and not "of" Steve Zissou, a team effort and experience, much like the cinema itself.

And if there was any doubt about the artifice, the film opens with a proscenium, a curtain rising, and a screening of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. It’s "Adventure No. 12: ‘The Jaguar Shark’ (Part One)," and the somewhat crapulous Jacques Cousteau figure of Zissou (Bill Murray, taking it up a notch after Lost in Translation) introduces the crew of his oceanographic vessel the Belafonte: Klaus Daimler (Willem Dafoe), the ship’s engineer and a co-dependent adorer of Steve; Eleanor Zissou (Anjelica Huston), Steve’s Olympian wife and the brains behind the operation; Pelé des Santos (Seu Jorge), safety expert and performer of the bossa nova versions of the David Bowie songs that make up much of the film’s soundtrack; and Esteban du Plantier (Seymour Cassel), chief diver and Steve’s oldest colleague.

"Adventure No. 12" ends when Esteban gets eaten by a mythic "Jaguar Shark," whereupon the lights come up and Zissou faces the less than overwhelmed audience that remains. In truth, his work is more along the lines of Spinal Tap than the standard documentary, a fact he seems unaware of. ("Why are they laughing?" he asks.) A young man in a silly uniform (Owen Wilson) asks him what’s next. Steve replies that he plans to hunt down the shark that ate his friend and kill it, "perhaps with dynamite."

This Melvillean task is complicated by another primal issue; the person who asked is Ned Plimpton, and he might be Steve’s son from a liaison three decades before. Issues of future revenge and past responsibilities aside, there are material problems troubling Zissou’s waters. Slick rival Alistair Hennessy (Jeff Goldblum), who’s also Eleanor’s former spouse, has drained all the grant money, and the team seems left high and dry for funding for "Part Two" of "Adventure No. 12." Ned, however, has a serendipitous hefty inheritance, and he’s promptly enlisted as co-investor and crew member. The arrival of journalist Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett) to write an article on Steve raises the hope of renewed publicity; pregnant and mateless, Jane brings her own problems and possibilities. The Belafonte is under way, bearing some heavy emotional and thematic cargo.

Few directors could sustain such a load with the grace, wit, and spontaneity of Anderson. Weird non sequiturs, brilliant bons mots, and bizarre flora and fauna buoy the narrative, as does Anderson’s tone of high-spirited but grave playfulness. To create such imaginary aquatic life as "Sugar Crabs," the "Rat Tail Envelope Fish" and the Jaguar Shark itself, Anderson turned to old fashioned "stop-action" animation rather than CGI, employing the same techniques Georges Méliès used in Le voyage dans la lune and evoking the same wonder. His sets, too, establish a feeling of enclosure against the wild, an air of adventure mixed with security. Zissou’s home base of Pescespada Island, his Buster Keatonish Belafonte, and his yellow submarine the Deep Search constitute a Neverland with submersibles.

As the grizzled Peter Pan, Murray puts in his most understated and complex performance; he’s by turns pathetic, obnoxious, and scintillating. He’s the best person to share this Life with, its moments of magic and weirdness and occasional nausea. Maybe the defining image in the film is Steve holding up above the fray a champagne glass containing a tiny, multi-colored "Crayon Pony-Fish," a figment of the imagination, and therefore fragile and precious.