THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU (2004) *** You know what this reminds me of? It reminds me of Neil Young's Broken Arrow ranch, with all these characters walking around: but films rarely cause in me such senses of aggravated ambivalence. For a movie in which Bill Murray depicts a character that must surely speak to him, at least in his darker moments, there's a failure of soul. I've never seen Cate Blanchett so nondescript, though pressed on the issue-like Bill but not as much-you'd have to agree that she's good. It's difficult to imagine Bill and Owen Wilson having so many scenes together that never quite ignite, for such a passionately semi-surrealist script there sure are a lot of dull spaces. But Seu Jorge has an incredible sense of early David Bowie, Anjelica Huston's appropriately regal bitch smouldering goddess, Willem Dafoe's just as out there as you'd hope, I can't think of anyone better to play the Jeff Goldblum character, Robyn Cohen's alluring and mysterious and somehow pedestrian...it's an awful lot of people doing a good job...but after you add the ingredients you're supposed to utter some magic words, and the potion somehow doesn't take place for me. But it's a film with transcendent moments: the scene of Bill to the accompaniment of Iggy Pop's "Search and Destroy" is cinema-is it magical realism or bas relief?-of the highest magnitude. This is, we all know, including him, the real Bill. And the faux underwater sets and animals are incredible, the shots of them preparing to meet the Jaguar Shark in their feeble submarine are no less sublime than a Greek choir, or the greatest of Elizabethan couplets. I'd be proud to have that on my dorm room wall even if I didn't like the movie, because of what the film invokes. It's a Wes Anderson film.
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