Streaming: Why ‘The Life Aquatic' never made a splash

Perhaps it’s the sea that heaves up all our troubles with our fathers — or at least that’s one way to read “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.” In many ways, this 2004 picture is the strangest and least-loved film in the oeuvre of idiosyncratic auteur Wes Anderson.

Bill Murray plays sea captain and documentarian Steve Zissou in a register even deader than his usual deadpan (the film arrived in 2004, a year after his heady, middle-aged breakthrough in “Lost in Translation”). At the Loquasto International Film Festival, Zissou debuts part one of a new film, in which his beloved partner is consumed by a mysterious species posited to be a jaguar shark. He states that the scientific purpose of the sequel film will be “revenge” against the deep-sea creature but, when pressed, he concedes, “I’ll fight it, but I’ll let it live.”

Air Kentucky pilot Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), mourning his mother’s overdose death, arrives at Zissou’s ship, the Belafonte, and suggests that he might be Steve’s son. The older man demurs on accepting parental responsibility but insists on rechristening Ned as “Kingsley Zissou.”

The elder Zissou hits up his beleaguered financier Oseary Drakoulias (Michael Gambon) who finds no support to underwrite the Belafonte’s next voyage. Thus an alternate plan is hatched to drain Ned’s savings and raid the base of much-better financed rival Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum). As Zissou admits to his wife Eleanor (Anjelica Huston), “I haven’t been at my best this past decade.”

He ships out with loyal mates Klaus Daimler (Willem Dafoe, trying to outdo Wilson’s ridiculous Southern accent with his own Germanic purr) and Pelé dos Santos (Seu Jorge), providing Portuguese-language covers of David Bowie and rocking custom Zissou Adidas sneakers. Reporter Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett) joins the voyage to compose an exposé about Zissou by day and read Proust to her unborn baby by night. A smitten Ned tells her, “I think you’ll make a very good single mother,” but their cabin canoodling displeases Steve, who uses an albino dolphin cameraman to spy through the porthole.

In spite of all the very Anderson touches, the film features surprisingly violent encounters with pirates and a scrappily-shot crew mutiny at sea. These less-composed action sequences are a departure from the “Last Supper” level of symmetry omnipresent in Anderson’s other films

If “The Life Aquatic” is about father and son conflicts, it’s also about devotion of an artist to his project. Even with bullets whizzing by his head, Zissou barks instructions at his camera and sound-men to ensure coverage shots for the documentary. We see how making a film on a shoestring budget is even tougher than sniffing out a reclusive jaguar shark. In his melancholic life aquatic, Zissou may be washed up — but he’s still able to make the wistful declaration under his breath, “This is an adventure.”

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