Far-fetched ‘Life Aquatic’ alienates audience In theaters

“The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” directed by Wes Anderson, written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach, 118 minutes, rated R. Now playing, Railroad Square Cinema, Waterville.

Wes Anderson’s “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” joins the recent “Ocean’s 12” in that it exists too far on the outside to allow audiences on the inside. It chooses style over logic, character and story, and while it has a likable cast that seems game to entertain, the script hampers them with a pulse too offbeat to generate momentum.

“Life Aquatic” is Anderson’s most self-conscious movie to date. It’s also his worst. Unlike his best films, “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums,” it doesn’t find the director observing life with his characteristic quirks, but meddling with them. The result is a film that becomes increasingly forced, manufactured and dull, which is particularly disappointing given its promising premise and strong start.

In it, Bill Murray is Steve Zissou, an Americanized version of Jacques Cousteau who once was famous for producing rousing documentaries about the life aquatic. Zissou is a sea celebrity whose star is on the wane. Not only is his career in the can – he hasn’t had a hit documentary in years – but his marriage to his glamorous wife, Eleanor (Anjelica Huston), is on the verge of collapse.

Complicating matters for Zissou is that his long-lost son, Ned (Owen Wilson), has recently entered his life; the British journalist Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett) may be writing a hatchet piece about him; and his best friend, Estaban du Plantier (Seymour Cassel), was recently eaten by a shark.

And not just any shark. We’re talking the jaguar shark, a mysterious beast of the deep no one else but Zissou has seen. Well, no one else but Zissou and Estaban, who has realized that rare fate that befalls so few. He has become jaguar shark droppings.

For most, this would be too much to handle. But not for Zissou. For him, it’s a grand opportunity to film a comeback picture filled with enough drama to seal his future. After all, Zissou plans to seek out the jaguar shark and blow it up with dynamite. And what sells better to the masses than a nice, satisfying explosion?

As written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach, “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” sounds fun, but it isn’t. The fun is stripped out of it. Occasionally, Murray lifts the film with his droll delivery, and Huston, who is armed with the bite of a woman who has known the world but never beauty, holds your interest with that face, those eyes, that hair. But the movie is more for the page than it is for the screen.

Too many threads criss-cross here, too many ideas and shifts in tone. The actors inhabit an exclusive world that exists in a vacuum. Audiences will want to step inside, but they won’t be able to. This club is private and all of the doors are locked.

Grade: D+

On video and DVD

“Open Water,” written and directed by Chris Kentis, 79 minutes, rated R.

In “Open Water,” the bold thriller from writer-director Chris Kentis, a high-powered career couple leave their hectic lives in the city for what promises to be a relaxing vacation in the Caribbean, one free of cell phones, the pressure of the daily grind, the monotony of habit.

For them, the sea is an escape from the concrete world that surrounds them – they welcome the open water and, to hear them tell it, they have paid plenty to play in it.

So be it. After a brief interlude that suggests Daniel (Daniel Travis) and Susan (Blanchard Ryan) aren’t as happy as they should be together, they board a tour boat, scuba dive with 18 others, and hope to reconnect in the deep reaches of the sea.

They reconnect, all right. When the tour boat operators mistakenly leave them stranded in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight, Daniel and Susan must find strength and solace in each other while gradually coming to realize some difficult truths about themselves, their relationship and especially their perilous situation.

What becomes clear to them is that all the control they felt they once had in their lives is and always has been an illusion. They have none, which is unfathomable to them. Now essentially fish food, they bob helplessly in the middle of nowhere while scores of sharks circle – and bite. The tension Kentis mines from this lean, deceptively simple premise is formidable, sometimes unbearable, always admirable. This is particularly true since in the water with these actors are over 50 real sharks – not mechanical ones, a la Spielberg. The film’s ultra-low, $130,000 budget didn’t allow for it. It also didn’t allow for consistently clear audio (that’s a quibble) or for the actors to be protected by a cage. That’s really them in the water with these sharks, barracudas and stinging jellyfish, which gives the movie an immediacy and an urgency that can be excruciatingly palpable to watch.

Grade: A-

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, 5:30 p.m. Thursdays on WLBZ 2 Bangor and WCSH 6 Portland, and are archived at Rotten

Tomatoes.com. He may be reached at BDNFilm@aol.com.