Found in Translation

the sea inside: Bill Murray as Wes Anderson's oceanic doppelganger.

Wes Anderson defends the power of fakery.

THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU

by Sam Adams

A closing title may disavow any connection between The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou's titular oceanographer and Jacques Cousteau, but no disclaimer can separate Steve Zissou from the film's director and co-writer. Wes Anderson may prefer too-tight suits to Zissou's trademark knit cap and Speedo, but you'd be forgiven for confusing one explorer of strange worlds for another. They even share a crew: Anderson's sound mixer doubles as Zissou's boom man, and their script girls have the same given name (though one hopes Anderson's spends less time topless).

By themselves, such in-jokes don't amount to much -- a touch of self-consciousness, or a nod to a faithful collaborator. But they're an indicator that the truth of The Life Aquatic is not to be found in the film's characteristically elegant surfaces, its hollow characters or its deliberately absurd plot, which involves a search for a creature most often referred to as "the jaguar shark, or whatever it is, if it exists." At its heart, The Life Aquatic is an ardent, eloquent defense of artistic fakery, and its ability to trigger emotions that are themselves quite real.

With Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson proved he is nothing if not an aesthete, and with the latter film, that he could be not much more. Like Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic's tableaux are composed and art-decorated with microscopic precision, and the characters seem to have been conceived in a game of absurdist can-you-top-this? But in the new film, Robert Yeoman's camera is allowed to roam free, and Anderson doesn't make the mistake of pressing us to take the characters too seriously by trapping them in maudlin situations. Even a major character's death is announced by a wash of red over the lens, as if oozing lifeblood were just an excuse to try out a new color palette.

Like the cast of any adventure movie, Steve Zissou's crew is a motley one, which Anderson composes with internationalist flair, from the Sikh cameraman to the Brazilian mate (City of God's Seu Jorge) whose main duty seems to be performing Portuguese versions of David Bowie songs. There's Willem Dafoe as Klaus Daimler, Zissou's neurotic right-hand man; Owen Wilson as Ned Plimpton, the commuter pilot who may or may not be Zissou's illegitimate son; and Cate Blanchett as Jane Winslett-Richardson, the perilously tan, visibly pregnant British journalist whose story may be Zissou's last shot at a comeback.

It seems audiences have begun to suspect that Zissou's documentaries are not, shall we say, entirely factual, which may explain why Zissou's boat seems to boast many more filmmakers than oceanographers. Anderson quite explicitly couldn't care if Zissou's films are real or not; the moment when Zissou exclaims, "It's a documentary -- it's all really happening!" comes at the end of a bravura tracking shot designed to reveal that Zissou's four-story boat is, in fact, a giant cutaway set. The creatures who populate Zissou's undersea world are extravagant fakes like the "crayon pony fish" a child gives him in the opening scene, stop-motion creations that recall the monsters in Ray Harryhausen movies. (The animation here is by Henry Selick of The Nightmare Before Christmas.) Anderson's gambit is to create overtly false images of such beauty that you want to believe in them anyway, like a night tide of "electric jellyfish" strewn like moist, glowing jewels along the beach. Reality, so Anderson would like to remind us, isn't so interesting that it couldn't use a dash of style.

The trouble is that, unlike filmmakers from Luchino Visconti to the Wachowski brothers, Anderson's style doesn't seem to spring from a system of belief. It's hard to know what viewers who don't key into The Life Aquatic's subtext will make of it. There wasn't a moment when I felt for any of the characters or cared what happened next, and though the film is full of sharp gags, they don't build to any apparent purpose; it's a riff without a melody. The Life Aquatic is loaded with references -- the boat set evokes Jerry Lewis' The Ladies Man, while Zissou's trip in a hot-air balloon recalls Peter O'Toole's descent from the heavens in The Stunt Man -- but the most obvious touchstone is François Truffaut's Day for Night, a paean to the filmmaking process in which the end product is incidental. The focus on process, on "the life," is why the only thing Anderson's movie shares with 8 1/2 is Cinecitta.

Based on The Life Aquatic, it seems fair to venture that Wes Anderson feels about making movies the way Steve Zissou does about undersea exploration; financiers willing, he'd spend the rest of his life down there. At the tenderest moment in their thorny relationship, Ned asks his maybe-father, "Do you ever wish you could breathe underwater?" There's little question Anderson, like his cinematic counterpart, would answer affirmatively. But no matter how beautiful the sea, sometimes you have to break the surface.

THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU Directed by Wes Anderson A Touchstone release Opens Saturday at Ritz East