Quickly, I don't want to bore anyone. There's a Wes Anderson Box set coming out. People are going to revisit his films, and I've always held THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU as my least favorite. Allow me to explain:
By this fourth film, Anderson had established that most of his narratives were about a borderline sociopathic narcissist/dreamer who was both beautiful and terrible. With the first film it was about friends of about equal age (though family loomed) and with the second it was about a young kid dreamer/narcissist and an older father figure. The third was about a father figure who was the dreamer narcissist and his children, so by the third film he established that he had a main character type: someone who both ruins and makes everyone's lives better by being a prickly weirdo perfectionist who is generally surrounded by a family either or blood or found. And they're kind of a director character... made literal in RUSHMORE.
For me to the point of 2004, THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS was his masterpiece, with BOTTLE ROCKET not far behind. The problem with the character of the narcissist is that in RUSHMORE, we don't believe we've reached the end of Max Fisher. This isn't the moment the character learns something that changes his being, he's just reached a successful detente. The reason why I pissed off a friend coming out of the movie was because my first thought was "he's so close to his masterpiece" is because RUSHMORE doesn't end, it stops. With BR the main character is Luke Wilson, and so you can end by sending Dignan to prison and it's a mixed moment but a real conclusion. With TENENBAUMS, it ends with death, but one that the film was always about, so it's not really cheating - indeed if it didn't end with Royal dead, it wouldn't work as well because it was always about his death, imagined and then real.
As good as whatever else about the film there is, THE LIFE AQUATIC is about an old dreamer and a young pup, and in this version Anderson kills off the kid.*
Were this a first film, I don't think this would bother me, or the first film of this cycle. My problem isn't just that it's a father learning how to be a good person after his kid is killed - which is kind of a gross point to make but more digestible in a different context - it's that it didn't feel to me like there was much of a point in it except as a way to show the narcissist had changed, and death was a tool he learned and used in the previous movie.
I don't look at writing or filmmaking as math, but when filmmakers do mathematical things, it often trips my censors. If I saw the film out of context of Anderson as a filmmaker, I might be able to go along with it as a narrative choice. Here, to me, it feels like a mildly different iteration of the same formula, and a career death as a fourth film where the filmmaker wasn't making new movies, he was just making a variation on the same one over and over again - which is more appealing in a Boetticher/genre exploration of tropes. It's why I like THE DARJEELING LIMITED more, even if it is a very small little picture. And it's because he literally throws his parent's baggage away. And honestly (even if FANTASTIC MR. FOX is a second "final curtain" for this narrative) I think everything since has been great, though I haven't seen the new one yet. I mean ISLE OF DOGS isn't strong, but its better than its reputation.
*some have read this as Anderson coping with the fact that his writing partner Owen Wilson was achieving success outside of the nest and was maybe leaving him. It's an interesting read.
