A man setting out to snare the shark that devoured his best buddy doesn't sound like a Wes Anderson film. This is the man behind Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums that we're talking about, after all. Don't worry, though - the plot may have the scent of Jaws, but the essence is about as Yellow Submarine as ever.
Bill Murray is Steve Zissou, the Jacques Cousteau-esque sealife filmmaker on a mission to find the allusive beastie that chowed down on his right-hand man. Embarking with him on his last voyage are pregnant English journalist Jane (Cate Blanchett), his overprotective second-in-command Klaus (Willem Dafoe), his icy missus Eleanor (Anjelica Huston) and Ned (Owen Wilson), a former airline pilot who just might be Steve's offspring.
Like the best of Anderson's strange, self-mocking and wistful movies, this is a comedy about fathers, heroes and death. From the brilliantly deadpan Murray on down, it's underplayed to within an inch of its life, but somehow that just seems to make the gentle laughs, half-hidden insights and occasional bursts of unexpected action all the more endearing and effective.
DVD Extras:
From the moment the yak-track commences you sense that this isn't going to be your bog-standard set of extras. Wes Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach penned the film while at a table in a New York restaurant, so decided it would be a good wheeze to do the commentary there as well. Witty insights into the making of the film (and they are pretty entertaining - who'd have guessed that Owen Wilson's southern accent is in fact a movie-long impersonation of Will Patton in Armageddon, for instance?) are interrupted by mobile phones, other diners and what sounds suspiciously like a bumbling waiter dropping a tray.Of course, it may all be fabricated. With the exception of the excellent deleted scenes - clearly only cut for length - don't take everything here at face value. The Mondo Monda Italian TV show interview with Anderson and Baumbach, for example. Daft, occasionally pretentious and very funny... but totally made-up.And just where else is Anderson playing games? The This Is An Adventure doc, chronicling the making of the film? Probably safe, if a little boring. Ditto the Starz On The Set US telly mini-doc. We're undecided about the Intern Video Journal, though - allegedly shot and edited by the actor playing `Zissou intern #1', Matthew Gray Gubler, formerly an intern of Anderson's back when Gubler was at film school. One of the sweetest, funniest and most likeable behind-the-scenes films, you'd love to believe it's for real, but doubts keep a-nagging. Especially when Noah Taylor sends Gubler a creepy video as a Halloween present, Willem Dafoe starts doing balancing tricks and Michael Gambon plays knuckle raps with the rest of the cast.But at the end, who cares which bits are real and which just products of Anderson's mischievous imagination? When Anderson plays games this enticing, you can't help but bite.
