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I think I might have been disappointed if I'd gone into the theater having just seen Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums. But since the film I saw most recently was, in fact, Blade Trinity, that telltale Real Movie Taste was unmistakable. A subpar Wes Anderson film is still much more enjoyable than most of the dreck I've seen this year -- even at this time of year, when the Oscar contenders are supposedly out in force (and for once, I have no idea which films they're supposed to be...does anyone know?).
I do think Life Aquatic is a little self-indulgent (the first time you hear David Bowie in Portuguese, it's clever, if pointless; the tenth time, it's just pointless), and it definitely lacks the pathos of Anderson's previous films. The characters are more caricature than in the past, but...unlikeable? Not to me...Dafoe and Jeff Goldblum in particular give performances that are practically Vaudeville, but you've gotta one humorless sonofabitch not to laugh at their better moments. The characters are all flat, which was to me more of a letdown in retrospect than while actually watching the film; yeah, had Anderson gone the deeper route of his past films, it certainly would have been better, but it also would have been a different film altogether. This is clearly meant to be a light entertainment. Taken for what it is -- and in a field of releases so uninspired I can't think of what half of them even are -- I really enjoyed it.
And I don't think the film is completely *without* depth, either. The whole point seems to be that Zissou has turned his entire life into bad TV (why would a documentary *need* a script girl, anyway?), and that increasingly he's used that (well, that and an everpresent roach) to make his own experience of life a shallow one -- it's all theater. Outside the theater, there's a lot of pain and loss that's simply too much to be dealt with squarely. If the metaphor falls down, it's because we are shown the people in Zissou's life as one-dimensional; but I do think (without giving spoilers) that Zissou at least is allowed to become genuine by film's end. Whether his epiphanies work for you probably has a lot to do with how well the film has worked for you to that point...they do work for me, but definitely lack the same power as similar character developments in (especially) The Royal Tenenbaums.
More to the point, though, the theater I saw it in was packed, and people were laughing their asses off. |
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