Saturday, July 22, 2006
The Life, It's Aquatic
If you rent The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou listen to the commentary. It is revealing. Wes Anderson made the commentary in the same NY restaurant he and his co-author wrote the movie — they stayed for both meals. Not a bad life.
The movie is not exactly a parody of Cousteau, but an imaginary excursion based on a jumping off point: a documentarian star, his disintegrating life and his great White Whale. The cast is very good — everyone. I was especially surprised at how good Owen Wilson was — foregoing his comic persona for a Billy Budd character. He almost stole the movie from some terrific actors. It turns out Wilson is an old friend and colleague of Wes Anderson's. Anything with Bill Murray is likely to be good, and once again Murray inexplicably carries the full weight of a movie while seeming to hardly try. He is just a very good actor, very engaging at seeming disengaged.
The real star of course is Wes Anderson, who is an odd duck for a Hollywood type; a Hollywood type who lives in New York apparently. Anderson makes these personal Big Movies — they feel like full blown Hollywood productions, but they have a personal quality. This is distinct from Woody Allen movies, which never feel “big”. Anderson isn't a warm person, but he is positive and interested. Like Altman he has an openness in his movies, although he makes them with much more attention to detail and structure than Altman. Altman is something of a little king, dipping into the talents of those around him. Anderson seems to have great authority with the actors — they say he “likes all sorts of people”. In the commentary Anderson was less interested in promoting his ego than in telling something about the movie. Although he is tenacious in his attention to detail, he isn't a control freak. A very balanced guy, as a director anyway.
The story is not much to speak of, the movie has long flat spots, but it somehow works okay. Anderson understands that creative work is really the work of presenting a world that people can enter. He wants to “bring things to life”. He understands that imagination trumps concept. The world he creates integrates the artificial and the real — very close to the world modern life presents, the movie seeming more real for its artificiality. In this movie he uses stop action animation to great effect — if not quite the fully magical experience for which he might have hoped. He said at one point that he is lucky to be able to make movies. You don't hear that simple recognition from the privileged tots in the entertainment industry very often — and feel they truly grasp their luck, rather than are simply, once again, manipulating.