Review // THE LIFE AQUATIC - Sonofabitch I'm sick of these dolphins

Forget Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. The Life Aquatic is Wes Anderson's best movie. Okay, maybe don't forget Rushmore, but still, Aquatic hasn't received the love it deserves. Though, it might have been Anderson's own fault. The Tenenbaum's is fussy and meandering and likely burned a lot of people out with its preciousness. It felt too close to the themes and characters explored in Rushmore and more like the settling in of a comedy "brand" rather than an original vision.

I'm not going to go on and on about Life Aquatic since I already did my Wes Anderson appraisal a few weeks back. I'll say this: it's fucking funny as shit. And light on its feet, lighter and more playful than Tenenbaums which got bogged down in its own cleverness. It's still 100% Anderson quirk and no less precious than his other films, but it's premise is fresh and fun and it delivers perhaps the quintessential Bill Murray performance. Basically, if you're a Bill Murray fan than this film is the heaviest hit of what you crave. His Steve Zissou is a Jacques Cousteau in hard times, a grizzled, tired, pot-head has-been and Murray absolutely kills with some of the funniest, cutting lines of his career.

At one point, Murray utters the line "I hate fathers and I never wanted to be one". On paper, the line could read as very transparent, a screenwriter loading backstory and his own pathos into a phrase that could only be forced out of the mouth of a movie character. But Murray transforms it, makes it both funny and sad and loads it with feeling. His Zissou means it when he says it, but he wishes he didn't. Murray also runs with the straight up jokes. When he says "sonofabitch, I'm sick of these dolphins" I was crying laughing. And later, when every characters is smooshed inside a Beatles-esque submersible, Murray breaks down at the sight of the Jaguar Shark he has been hunting like Ahab--and I cried for real. It's a surprisingly touching and potent moment and the fact that it occurs at the tail end of a fantastical romp is a pleasant sucker punch. Murray's Zissou lost his dearest friend to the shark, but his quest for vengeance has brought him to an entirely different place. Zissou has found and lost a son, come to terms with the state of his legacy and faced down his own mortality. The hands of his companions reach out to comfort him as he absorbs the meaning of the moment and cries. It's a cathartic capper to perhaps the best work of Murray's career.

Some of the hype and crippling expectation has died down around Wes Anderson. Now is the perfect time to see or re-watch The Life Aquatic and appreciate it for the left field masterpiece it is.