At the Movies: `The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou'

With each new movie he makes, Wes Anderson drifts further away from the rare gem that was "Rushmore."

In "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," as in that 1998 film, the director has created another meticulously structured, intentionally quirky universe. But his largest and most ambitious film yet seems more like an extension of his most recent one, "The Royal Tenenbaums" from 2001, for its outright absurdity - and, unfortunately, for its notable lack of heart.

Anderson's gleeful take-off on undersea adventure movies (and on movies about the making of movies) is never boring, and it's consistently laugh-out-loud funny. He's always given his characters a distinctive cadence to their speech, and here with writing partner Noah Baumbach he provides his cast of heavyweight actors, many of whom are returning from his previous movies, an endless amount of material to play with.

If you'll pardon the water pun, though, Anderson is drowning in superficial details. He's too obsessed with minutiae at the expense of substantive character development.

Weirdness for weirdness' sake:

Yes, the three-story-tall rendering of Steve's '70s era hunk of a boat, the Belafonte, is impressive all sliced open down the middle for us to peer inside as if it were a dollhouse. And it's a hoot to watch Bill Murray as the Cousteau-like explorer of the film's title running around the boat with a gun in his hand, chasing Filipino pirates while wearing nothing more than a light-blue robe, a blue Speedo and flip-flops.

But too often, Anderson seems interested in weirdness for weirdness' sake. There's one guy on the crew (Seu Jorge, who played Knockout Ned in "City of God") whose entire job consists of sitting on deck and singing Portuguese versions of David Bowie songs while playing the acoustic guitar. And his renditions are lovely, but afterward it's hard to escape the nagging feeling of, what was the point of that?

Other members of Team Zissou, as they're called, include engineer Klaus (Willem Dafoe, who's sort of sweet in an uncharacteristically goofy comedic role); Steve's wealthy wife, Eleanor (an eccentrically regal Anjelica Huston), who's universally known as the brains of the operation; and the newest member, Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson, Anderson's longtime friend and collaborator), a true Southern gentleman who only recently approached Steve with the news that he might be the famous explorer's son.

The story:

Ned comes aboard after leaving his job as a pilot for Air Kentucky airlines (their hub is Louisville, in case you're wondering) and soon falls in love with the pregnant and glowing journalist Jane Winslett Richardson (a pregnant and glowing Cate Blanchett), who's writing a piece on Team Zissou's latest mission: hunting down the jaguar shark that ate Steve's best friend and partner, Esteban (Seymour Cassel, another Anderson regular).

Ned's job pretty much is to hold the boom mike during Steve's documentary shoots and yell observations like, "I've never seen so many electric jellyfish in all my life!" He also helps provide a father-son subplot for Steve's films, which may or may not be genuine, but that doesn't matter. Steve isn't above faking footage, or stealing equipment from his slick rival, Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum), whose shiny, white behemoth of a ship looks like an Ian Schrager hotel on the high seas.

Steve Zissou is a great showy role written especially for Murray, an Anderson favorite since "Rushmore." He gets to be cocky and self-serious, vulnerable and more than a little childish. Outwardly, Steve seems stoic and slightly mad. Inwardly, we are to presume that he's at least vaguely interested in the son that Ned offers himself to be, and we're expected to believe that the feeling is mutual. But we never truly believe that, because the film's structure and self-consciousness keep us at arm's length.

We cared about Max Fischer and Margaret Yang in "Rushmore" (and Murray's character, Herman Blume) because they were allowed to express real emotions. Here, so much dialogue is delivered in such deadpan fashion, it's hard to know what's real and what's part of the gimmick.

Like the film's fake fish - rainbow-colored creatures with fabricated names, which were created using stop-motion animation - "The Life Aquatic" is endlessly fascinating to watch but, if you look closer, there's not much there.

"The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," a Touchstone Pictures release, runs 118 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.