The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

What looked like a step beyond the precocious emptiness of The Royal Tenenbaums is instead just more of the same -- director Wes Anderson stuffs so many cheeky stylistic touches into the film, and plays everything so deadpan, that the proceedings never come alive. The film is so detached that it's infuriating... and what's most aggravating is that I can't bring myself to hate it. For one thing, it does represent minor progress over Royal, if only because Anderson seems aware of his world's artificiality here, which for a while at least makes for interesting viewing (it's like the film's autocritical). And it's not like I can't intellectually appreciate what Anderson tries to do here and in his other films -- in constructing these patently fake worlds, he's doing what he can to show how we all build little worlds around ourselves in order to avoid or reduce the pain we feel. Thing is, though, Atom Egoyan makes movies with much the same theme, except he allows himself to get deep within his characters and show them trying to negotiate the prisons they build. Anderson would rather stand off to the side and point out the things he finds interesting without actually involving himself. The film does still work from an aesthetic standpoint, and there's a couple sequences that do work nicely, and there's thankfully nothing as grievous as the suicide attempt in Tenenbaums. But I can't help but think how much more potent the climactic sequence would have been had Anderson allowed himself (and, by extension, us) to care. Call me when you grow a heart, Wes.

Grade: C+