As he continues to move towards industrial strength, old-fashioned storytelling, Wes Anderson has been refining a certain brand of sadism. He has always delighted in afflicting characters with obsessive, selfish ambitions ­ turning them into their own worst enemies ­ and has, with each film, dropped them into increasingly obstacle-ridden territory and left them to fend for themselves. In his latest film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach hurl everything they can at their eponymous protagonist, killing his best friend and then crippling his revenge mission; Zissou (Bill Murray) finds himself strapped for financing, under the relentless scrutiny of journalist Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett) and forced to reckon with the arrival of what could be his long lost son, Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson). Though cruel, Anderson is never unfair, and his protagonists are plenty capable of meeting his challenges, usually after reluctantly submitting to excruciating growing pains. Here too, Bill Murray battles admirably right up until the film’s irresistible finale, finally catapulting Zissou into a belated and admittedly glum adulthood.

Like Rushmore (1998) or The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) before it, The Life Aquatic is a defiantly filmic, shamelessly unreal experience. It’s something like a lab experiment—a careful study of a delicate, artificial environment but less contained and controlled than the previous works. The data is less decisive but more intriguing, and in the end their accumulation is more interesting to watch. The director has broken down the labyrinth’s walls, leaving plenty of escape routes to the “outside world.” The film opens with Zissou presenting his latest film to this world and his laconic pose is a first indication of the tribulations he’s about to face. The Tenenbaum clan or Max Fischer always seemed to be immune to the demands of anything outside their own immediate, and, at times, incestuous contexts. Zissou is afforded no such comfort zone; he encounters prying heckling as he leaves his latest screening, continual reminders of the pragmatic requirements that his filmmaking entails, and a relentless string of outsiders forced upon him and his team. This makes for an acute sense of vulnerability both in the film, and in Zissou, who seems to be feeling it for the first time. No one senses this more keenly than Klaus (Willem Dafoe), Zissou’s longtime crew member and surrogate younger brother. Dafoe skillfully makes his character’s overprotective and subservient nature endearing rather than grating: his tenacious confrontations with Ned, culminating with the wordless “understanding” they come to, mark a high-point of the film’s unlikely off-tone comedy.

It’s an inspired and pitiless choice to make Zissou a filmmaker, splitting him between his actual explorations and the performing and packaging of them, and Bill Murray deftly walks the line between loving and hating the amount of showmanship, as opposed to oceanography, that he has to engage in. This duality is at the heart of the film and cuts through (and often undercutting) all its key moments. The first time we see the team actually go diving, an energizing episode set to one of the many hypnotic techno tracks by Mark Mothersbaugh, Ned asks Steve if he can call him Dad, just as they are about to roll. Apparently oblivious to the larger ramifications Zissou commends Ned’s “good impulse…to use some kind of nickname” but rejects Dad as “too specific.” Zissou’s detachment here may seem churlish and self-involved, but isn’t it also a grotesque effect of the schizophrenic demands to both ‘live’ and ‘depict’ his life? The loss of his best friend and the realization of his own mortality leave him incapable of the balancing act required. Zissou’s boorishness may make him inaccessible, but, amidst jubilant calls to create our own iMovies or the soundtrack to our iLives how can his predicament not seem at least remotely familiar? Bad Education and Tarnation are two recent films that mine related territory—Almodovar focuses on a filmmaker for whom “…life becomes the material for creative work and only secondarily, what is lived,” as one reviewer put it letting him off the hook, while Jonathan Caouette is himself the fullblown embodiment of the urge and willingness to frame our lives onscreen. His film may be lackluster as story but forces tough decisions on where exposition ends and exhibition begins.

The imposition of a journalist on Zissou and crew works perfectly to interrogate the Zissou dichotomy. Played with impeccable precision by Cate Blanchett, Jane Winslett-Richardson’s sturdy intransigence in the face of one of her childhood heroes is a harbinger of the film’s sympathies. She will have no part of Zissou’s posturing. When asked, “Are you gonna screw us on this article?” she honestly responds, “I don’t know.” Blanchett’s journalist without an agenda carries the mantle of the film’s ethical core with poise and grace. This makes Zissou’s repeated meddling with her article, consisting of equal parts odd passive-aggression and naïve flirting, hard to take but also undeniably topical. The aura of timelessness is a red herring; the film’s sensibility is utterly up-to-date. It’s a testament to the journey that Murray and Anderson take him on that Zissou is finally able to accept that there is much more at stake in his latest mission than simply putting up an appearance.

Against this backdrop, the running joke about just how “documentary” Zissou’s filmmaking actually is takes on an added dimension. At times he is disturbingly cavalier, beginning a shoot by “starting with the reverse,” unabashedly indulging decidedly un-documentary practice. Later, in a key scene with Ned, Zissou insists that “It’s not just a movie, it’s all really happening.” When Ned retorts “And damn you for that,” the film acknowledges the very real stakes inherent in contributing to the documentary record. Neither an adequate substitute for life nor a reliable record of it, Zissou’s films, much like Anderson’s, are only one more way to understand the real world.

There’s a messy quality to the filmmaking that’s also less fussy than that of Anderson’s previous films. The free-floating camera work refuses to stop bobbing even when on hard ground. It’s hard to tell if this is an allusion to Zissou’s restless psyche, the handheld camera work of his crew member Vikram (Waris Ahluwalia) or just a half-assed nod to familiar documentary tropes. The handmade feeling extends to the music especially the David Bowie covers sung onscreen in Portugese by crew member Pelé (Seu Jorge) but also the aforementioned techno from Mothersbaugh. In one of the film’s show-stopping sections Zissou offers in voiceover to “tell us about his boat…” as a massive cross-section of his ship is shown complete with crew members going about various tasks. The voiceover could easily be something from one of Zissou’s past films, but when Ned suddenly interjects with a question it breaks the spell confirming what we’re hearing is actually a conversation between Ned and Steve. The scene defies categorization, typical of the dense messiness contained in much of The Life Aquatic’s best bits. On one level it is a pure documentary of the set itself—a set Anderson was so fond of he employed a special lens designed by NASA in order to capture its entirety in a single view. It also signals the tension and interrelation of the film Zissou is making with the one Anderson has made. Finally, it rhymes with a later pivotal scene in which Steve and Ned confront each other as they climb through the rooms of the ship all the way to its top deck. The visual mimicry is an economical way to associate the two scenes thereby marking the overall arch of the pair’s relationship.

This relationship anchors the film’s inquiry into Anderson’s pet themes of surrogate families and arrested adolescence. It may be because Ned’s actual status is never resolved in the film, but it is never clear what Ned himself is truly after. Is it only that, as Blanchett’s character misspeaks at one point Anderson wants “a baby for this father”? What we know of Ned and Owen Wilson would refute so easy a reading. There are depths to be plumbed in Ned’s needs and motivations, but Wilson seems either uninterested or oblivious to the task at hand. He gives Ned a hilarious deadpan bemusement but not much more.

This never stops Zissou from trying, in his own perverse way, to fulfill his awakened paternal instincts. His perverse zeal stands in marked contrast to the reluctant baby steps of a figure like Clint Eastwood’s Frankie in Million Dollar Baby. The two films both offer poignant accounts of surrogate fatherhood that meets ambivalent results. Eastwood’s vision is the more poised but it’s also the more ponderous. When Anderson’s finale arrives it’s almost impossible to conceive of anything that could work as an adequate culmination to the strangeness that has preceded it. The animation amidst which the scene is set is more than up to the task however, hitting a perfect note for the devastating encounter that waits. As utterly make-believe as everything else in the film, it draws its power from the fact that Zissou is finally able to sit in his vulnerability, literally and figuratively, instead of deflecting it. A vulnerability that matches the one Anderson has opened himself to in offering something as strange and unreliable as The Life Aquatic.

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