event The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou

With The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, a mopey meta-comedy about growing old and making movies, Wes Anderson suggests the melancholia of directors twice his age. An undercurrent of sadness runs in Anderson’s work, but rarely does it serve as such a heavy anchor to the delicate, whimsical hijinks on the surface. Less devoted to science than to show, long-in-the-tooth Jacques Cousteau surrogate Bill Murray and the rest of Team Zissou—including his wife Anjelica Huston, sycophantic German deckmate Willem Dafoe, bond-company stooge Bud Cort, free interns from the University Of Northern Alaska, and Seu Jorge singing David Bowie tunes in Portuguese—fall on hard times when a “jaguar shark” kills Zissou’s right-hand man on an expedition. Murray and his men take to the seas in search of revenge, all noted in painful detail by accompanying journalist Cate Blanchett.

With The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, a mopey meta-comedy about growing old and making movies, Wes Anderson suggests the melancholia of directors twice his age. An undercurrent of sadness runs in Anderson’s work, but rarely does it serve as such a heavy anchor to the delicate, whimsical hijinks on the surface. Less devoted to science than to show, long-in-the-tooth Jacques Cousteau surrogate Bill Murray and the rest of Team Zissou—including his wife Anjelica Huston, sycophantic German deckmate Willem Dafoe, bond-company stooge Bud Cort, free interns from the University Of Northern Alaska, and Seu Jorge singing David Bowie tunes in Portuguese—fall on hard times when a “jaguar shark” kills Zissou’s right-hand man on an expedition. Murray and his men take to the seas in search of revenge, all noted in painful detail by accompanying journalist Cate Blanchett.