"In twelve years, he'll be eleven and a half," Cate Blanchett's character says of her unborn child near the end of former wunderkind Wes Anderson's fourth film. Bill Murray answers: "That's my favorite age." After sitting through the extravagant adventures that Anderson cooked up for daring oceanographer Steve Zissou (Murray) and his motley crew, one begins to suspect that eleven and a half is also the age of Anderson's target audience.
Wes Anderson, who established himself as one of America's most exciting young directors with "Rushmore" in 1998, has always told stories about ambitious but emotionally immature outsiders: the wanna-be robbers of "Bottle Rocket," "Rushmore"'s amorous overachiever Max Fisher, and the entire family of oddball geniuses in "The Royal Tenenbaums." Steve Zissou, willful captain of the "Belafonte," is just such a guy: pompous, selfish and shortsighted, a discount-bin Jacques Cousteau with a red wool cap, a pot habit, and a tattoo of his submarine's name on his biceps.
His wacky crew, "Team Zissou," includes Anjelica Huston as his brainy wife, Owen Wilson as (possibly) his son, Michael Gambon as his financier, Willem Dafoe as the loyal but needy German Klaus. There's a bare-chested script girl and a group of unnamed, unpaid interns who schlepp heavy equipment and mix Campari drinks. Cate Blanchett, pregnant but unwilling to give up the chewing gum, and Jeff Goldblum as "part gay" rival oceonographer Hennessy, also tag along, all of them oh-so-quirky in their Steve Zissou uniforms.
But a boatload of bickering, absurd underwater explorers isn't enough. Anderson overloads the formula plot about the search for a legendary shark with the trademark quirky details and directoral ticks that pleased us the first three times around: a storybook opening, stylishly antiquated pay phones, immaculate framing, Proust jokes, slow-motion scenes scored with eclectic indie pop, stolen cappuccino machines, a crewmember strumming Portuguese covers of David Bowie songs, and so forth. Like an overeager teacher's pet worried that any one idea might not hold up, Anderson clutters so many of them all over the place that they crowd each other out.
