REVIEWED - THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU: Played with droll, deadpan aplomb by Bill Murray, Steve Zissou is an eccentric variation on Jacques Cousteau - a vain oceanographer and documentary filmmaker celebrated in his heyday for such productions as Island Cats! and The Battling Eels of Antibes.
This is Murray's third film for Wes Anderson, following Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, and he is the perfect foil for the engagingly idiosyncratic sense of humour that permeates Anderson's pictures.
The new movie opens in Italy, at the Loquasto world premiere of Zissou's latest opus, Adventure No 12: The Jaguar Shark (Part 1), chronicling an ill-fated expedition in which his closest colleague, Esteban du Plantier (Seymour Cassell) was devoured by a rare, 10-metre-long shark.
Zissou and his team, who wear matching red woolly caps, are about to embark on the sequel and to kill that jaguar shark when - tapping into Anderson's preoccupation with dysfunctional families and, specifically, fathers-son relationships - Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), a polite pilot with Air Kentucky, introduces himself as possibly being the son Zissou never knew he had from a former relationship.
Ned joins them aboard Zissou's craft, which is named the Belafonte, along with a pregnant journalist (Cate Blanchett) from Oceanographic Explorer, and as "a stooge from the bond company" (Bud Cort), who is there to monitor the budget for the film. Zissou's wife (Anjelica Huston) passes on joining them, opting instead to spend time with her ex-husband (Jeff Goldblum), who happens to be Zissou's wealthy, patronising rival.
As soon as the willing suspension of disbelief kicks in - as it did in the very first scene for me - Anderson's playfully whimsical comedy is on a roll, cruising through a sea of puns, parodies and absurdities. There is less to it than meets the eye, and the screenplay, though precisely plotted, feels almost irrelevant as it proceeds, suggesting that its principal function is merely a framework to support the verbal and visual humour.
Yet the narrative survives as a remarkably well-sustained conceit, embellished as it is with some gorgeous imagery, a succession of agreeable surprises and quirky creations, and an infectiously mellow mood enhanced by a dozen or so David Bowie songs performed in laid-back mode - and in Portuguese.
