Photo by Philippe Antonello

Watching a Wes Anderson movie is like taking an unguided tour
of a brainy, slightly deranged imagination that’s simultaneously geeky-gauche
and worldly-wise before its time. Anderson, who captured the loyalty of a similarly
disposed demographic with his 1996 debut crime caper Bottle Rocket, came
of artistic age with a bunch of other youngish filmmakers — Spike Jonze, Charlie
Kaufman, David O. Russell, Alexander Payne and Sofia Coppola prominent among
them — whose movies seem to fly unmediated from their vaguely depressive, compulsively
associative heads onto the screen. If their adamant refusal of linear narrative,
psychological coherence and cinematic violence suggests a loose generational
sensibility, the loony idiosyncrasy with which they stare into their own neurosis
and outward into a confounding world refutes all labeling. Collectively they
are the freshest thing to hit American cinema in decades, but individually their
brand of crackpot subjectivity always teeters on the brink of impenetrability.
The level of public bafflement and critical dissent over movies like Lost
in Translation, Adaptation and most recently I ♥ Huckabees
(all films I loved) suggests that sometimes it’s possible to dwell so far inside
your own innovative mind that your brains fall out.

Such is the case with Wes Anderson’s new film, The Life Aquatic
With Steve Zissou, an overstuffed creature with its head stuck so far up
its ass that it left me scratching my own, er, head. Co-written with his friend
Noah Baumbach, who made the lively Kicking and Screaming and is currently
adapting Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox with Anderson, The Life Aquatic
draws its inspiration from the director’s long-standing obsession with the cult
of French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, a notoriously swollen ego given to
feuding with friends, colleagues and family alike. In the movie Bill Murray
plays Steve Zissou, a washed-up oceanographer propelled by equally bloated proportions
of self-regard and self-loathing, who pulls together a crew of quarrelsome kooks
on a boat to make an epic documentary that will chronicle his efforts to settle
scores with a jaguar shark (whatever that is) that ate his longtime partner,
while upstaging a prosperous rival (Jeff Goldblum). When a gentlemanly young
Kentucky pilot named Ned Plimpton, played by Anderson’s longtime collaborator
Owen Wilson, shows up out of the blue, claiming to be Steve’s long-lost illegitimate
son, Steve sees an opportunity to become the father he has always meant to be.

Feuding families, swelling paternal egos and oedipal messes run
a thick fault line through Anderson’s work; he carries a cadre of actors with
him from one film to the next, remodeling them in variations on their earlier
roles. In Rushmore Murray played a tycoon trying to redeem poor parenting
of his own sons by befriending schoolboy Jason Schwartzman, then competing with
him for the affections of a pretty young teacher. And in The Royal Tenenbaums,
while Murray settled for playing husband/father-figure to Gwyneth Paltrow, Gene
Hackman took up the torch as the hopelessly incompetent patriarch of that family
of angry and depressed geniuses. For all their meandering plot lines, both those
wonderfully weird movies managed to cohere around a recognizable structure and
a cast small enough not to overwhelm Anderson’s underlying themes.

The Life Aquatic is a potentially great little cult picture
shrieking in protest at being bumped up into a $50 million studio movie whose
only real pleasure is its happy-color production design. A huge ensemble with
little to do but act wacky doesn’t help: Willem Dafoe as Steve’s insecure engineer;
Anjelica Huston, in a variation of her maternal role in Tenenbaums, as
his brilliant wife; Cate Blanchett, in a painfully fake British accent, as a
pregnant journalist (once again, Murray competes for her favors with a son,
bona fide or otherwise); Bud Cort, looking downright ancient as the bond-company
stooge who ends up rooting for Steve; and Seu Jorge as a safety expert given
to singing David Bowie songs in Portuguese, which I suppose must have seemed
funny on the drawing board. Crudely rendered fake fish, created by the talented
animator Henry Selick (James and the Giant Peach), float pointlessly
in the background. There are even lurches into action sequences, which the director
can’t seem to control. (Anderson ruefully but accurately told The New
York Times that in six-camera shots “You’re supposed to have six cameras
going, and I don’t know what to do with the other five.”) In his other
films it was a delight to tarry over Anderson’s fanciful yet truthful detail.
In The Life Aquatic you have to fight your way through his digressive
mess to find the story. Somewhere buried beneath all this ballast something
is being said, again, about flawed middle-aged men falling from grace and redeeming
themselves. This time I’m damned if I know what that something is, and I hope
that next time around Anderson will return to his greatest creative asset —
a small budget.

In the early phase of his career, Steven Soderbergh might well
have been dubbed the father of the Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze et al. school of
creative obfuscation. I’ve no doubt that Soderbergh can and will again make
inscrutably brainy pieces of varying distinction like Schizopolis, Kafka
and The Underneath. For now, though, he’s the nearest thing we have to
a gentleman director, and I mean that as an ardent compliment. For sheer urbane
elegance coupled with technical mastery and lush, old-fashioned élan,
no one working for the studios today comes close to the versatile Soderbergh,
who has shown himself as fluent in the language of old-Hollywood romance (Out
of Sight) as in the grainy nether regions of the international drug trade
(Traffic) or the L.A. crime world (The Limey), or in the plebeian
energies of populist agitprop (Erin Brockovich). In his remake of the
Rat Pack crime caper Ocean’s Eleven, Soderbergh seemed to reach a stylistic
peak. And though it’s not unusual for him to take a break between big pictures
and yield to a personal indulgence, this time around he’s clearly sticking with
what works. If anything, Ocean’s Twelve tops the suave formal daring
of its predecessor, and I’ve no doubt that even in the crush of holiday movies,
it will work a similar box-office miracle.

When last we saw Daniel Ocean (George Clooney) and his ragged
crew of petty-crime experts, they had penetrated the inaccessible vault of the
Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas and parted fastidious casino boss Terry Benedict
(Andy Garcia) from $160 million of his fortune, not to mention his girlfriend
Tess (Julia Roberts). Now they languish in miserable legitimacy, from which,
in a puckish and very funny reversal of the opening scenes of Ocean’s Eleven,
they’re sprung when Benedict dispatches his thugs to round them up and demand
they give him back his money. Following a series of increasingly impossible
heists around Europe, Daniel and his merry band find themselves pitted not only
against high-tech security gizmos and the cops, spearheaded by art-crime specialist
Catherine Zeta-Jones, but against the Continent’s premier playboy and thief,
the Night Fox (Vincent Cassel), who never saw a Fabergé egg he didn’t
like.

Ocean’s Twelve’s many twists and turns are intricately
fitted together and accessorized with nifty flashback and delirious pauses for
nutty banter. The movie, which has a crisply witty screenplay by George Nolfi,
pulls so many fast ones on both its characters and its audience that I can tell
you little more about the story that wouldn’t ruin it for you. Suffice it to
say that the movie starts off flitting between several American states and ends
up racing between several trendy European capitals, that Roberts gets to impersonate
a famous movie star, that other Soderbergh pals show up for gallant cameos,
that Cherry Jones does something surprising for Matt Damon’s hilariously overambitious
pickpocket, and that Zeta-Jones, gorgeous (despite a duck-bill hairdo) in black
leather and red silks, discovers that the line between crime and crimefighting
is finer than she’d thought. The heist scenes are as terrific as they are hilariously
abortive. Ocean’s Twelve may be one of the most glamorous, goofy and
heartfelt films about failure ever made, and as soon as I get out from under
Oscar-qualifying weepies about incest, child-molesting and paralysis, I’m going
to run out and see it again, just to cheer myself up.

THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU | Directed by WES ANDERSON
| Written by ANDERSON and NOAH BAUMBACH Produced by ANDERSON, BARRY MENDEL and
SCOTT RUDIN Released by Touchstone Pictures | At the Grove

OCEAN’S TWELVE | Directed by STEVEN SODERBERGH | Written
by GEORGE NOLFI | Produced by JERRY WEINTRAUB | Released by Warner Bros. Pictures
| Citywide

Advertising disclosure: We may receive compensation for some of the links in our stories. Thank you for supporting LA Weekly and our advertisers.