What makes The Life Aquatic each so humorous and tragic is its portrait of a tragic, useless man who can not management something in his life regardless of forcing everybody round him to be branded together with his mark. Whether or not it’s throughout a paramilitary rescue operation on a pirate-infested seaside resort, or the aforementioned movie premiere, each character is pressured to put on Steve’s vivid pink beanie as in the event that they had been serfs topic to his beneficence. And when he decides to just accept a candy man named Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson) as his long-lost grownup son, he instantly calls for this grown grownup additionally don the hat, the blue swim trunks, and ultimately Steve’s final title regardless of the truth that Zissou refused to satisfy Ned 30 years prior.
Steve lives in an exquisite Anderson world the place all of the fish, together with that loathed Jaguar Shark, are claymated confections coloured in pastels, or lit with inner-luminescence as seen within the glowing jellyfish on an Italian seaside. Steve captures all of it in his (and Anderson’s) personal pleasing picture. Consider the tour de pressure monitoring shot of Steve’s ship, the Belafonte, which by intelligent set design, animation, and digital camera motion is revealed to have a gourmand kitchen situated proper subsequent to a library stocked with first editions, and an enhancing bay/recording studio the place 35mm meeting cuts of his movies might be spliced collectively on the day.
Anderson tracks the stainless great thing about this world with a gliding monitoring digital camera on an elaborate set-build that’s revealed behind a rising curtain. After the showstopper is completed although, the digital camera pulls again and the sunshine on the plain soundstage the place a lot of this was constructed is dimmed. Steve has constructed a powerful however insular bubble round his life. It’s his personal little world that’s as stunning, and fleeting, as an evening on the theater. When the present is over, there’s nothing left to expertise.
And when the curtain is down, the fact can be not almost so clear. In actual fact, the primary time Anderson indulges one other of his signature monitoring pictures, following Steve throughout the actual higher deck of a ship that’s supposed to accommodate all these wonders, the pacing is harried and the vitality frantic, as underscored by the crescendo of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars.” Moments earlier, Steve was pressured to appreciate he has simply met the thirtysomething man who is likely to be his son, and his bubble is burst. He flees throughout the deck to flee the fact of the second, hiding towards a railing that’s lit by Christmas lights. Nonetheless, throughout him is darkness.
Later the conflict between Steve’s completely curated fantasy of what he thinks his life is, and the bitterness of actual life-and-death stakes outdoors that fairly image, involves a surreal head when pirates board his ship and spill intern blood on the Belafonte’s decks. Additionally they trapp Steve and his crew in a brutalist desaturation uncharacteristic of most Anderson movies. When Steve is ready to take management of the scenario by grabbing a gun and going Rambo lengthy sufficient to avoid wasting everybody besides his Bond Firm Stooge™, the colours return to the nice and cozy oversaturation we’ve come to anticipate from the movie, however it’s nonetheless a lie Steve is telling himself—one as delusional as considering getting “revenge” on a fish will convey that means to his unhappiness and midlife ennui.
Ultimately, Steve even claiming Ned as his son is a fallacy; we be taught from his long-suffering spouse and producer, Eleanor (Anjelica Huston), that Ned can’t be his youngster as a result of Eleanor found years earlier that her husband is capturing blanks. Apparently he spent too many days in a wetsuit. By this level although, Ned’s lifeless, and like every part else about this unhappy, “nice” artiste’s life, Eleanor is letting him reside in a fantasy divorced from the colder fact round him.
