The Life Quixotic

I just finished watching The Life Aquatic for the second time, and found myself regretting that I only saw it once in the theatre. Wes Anderson’s tribute to nature documentaries has been panned as lacking in plot, but on the second viewing I was able to divorce myself from the tracking shots, the hilarious montages, and the overall attractiveness of the film, and was ultimately much more emotionally involved in the characters this go-round.

Memorable characters are a trademark of Anderson’s films, along with a neurotic attention to detail. Each character has a crisis, a distinct costume, a last name. But most often, the attention to detail spikes the humor of the situation. Having interns on a documentary expedition in exchange for college credit is funny. Calling each intern “intern” and making them serve drinks while wearing T-shirts screen-printed with “intern” on them is very, very funny.

I was more enthralled, however, with the Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach’s joint commentary on the Criterion Collection DVD. They discuss The Life Aquatic at the Manhattan bar/restaurant where they wrote the entire movie—you can hear plates clanking in the background, and Anderson breaks a glass on the floor at one point. The two claim they ate multiple meals and drank multiple drinks per day while they wrote, becoming regulars at this restaurant. Ernie Hemingway, eat your heart out.

The ability to work in such attractive surroundings and to finance such an impulsive lifestyle is ridiculously appealing. Yeah, I'll eat two meals a day at a great restaurant, chat, and write movies. Yeah, I’ll use my newly-found budget to shoot on location in Italy, though there’s no reason to, except (a) it’s surrounded by the requisite water, (b) there’s a great opera house in Naples for the opening and closing scenes, and (c) it’s f-ing Italy.

The pair’s dialogue, when not citing Proust, Godard, Fellini, Bogdanovich, and others, is not unlike that in Anderson’s movies. It includes remarkable tidbits such as (rough quotes):

• “The Belafonte. We bought this ship in South Africa, and sailed it up to the Mediterranean, uh, renovated it, and made it into this research vessel.”

• “We decided it was going to be Bowie songs in Portuguese. But we did talk about Steve Miller at one point.”

• “These helicopters had a tag on them that said, ‘This is a home-built helicopter, not approved for any official kind of navigability.’ Something like that. Basically it just said don’t count on this helicopter. In fact, we crashed one of them, and had to get another one just like it.”

• "We couldn't get the 'I'm a Pepper' shirt cleared in Bottle Rocket."

• “Here, Bill Murray plays the action scene in a striped Speedo, a bathrobe, and flip-flops.”

• “We kept going back to this quote: ‘No one betrayed his talent more than Rod Stewart.’”

While Steve Zissou is certainly a nonsensical character, he could only have been born from a mind as absurd as Anderson. Anderson really is Zissou, albeit with a writer’s hand, director’s vision, and now, a producer’s budget. With the financial wherewithal to follow through on ideas others might consider outlandish, there’s no stopping him. I’m already excited for The Fantastic Mr. Fox.