Film review: Fatherhood and mentorship in “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”
By Morgan Toane
In Wes Anderson’s film, “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” we discover the legendary oceanographer and filmmaker, Steve Zissou (Bill Murray). Now an aging, self-absorbed charlatan with his halcyon days behind him, Zissou’s critical acclaim has waned along with his production budget. The man who inspired legions of “Team Zissou” fans no longer believes in himself.
Movie poster for "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" (Courtesy Touchstone Pictures)
When Zissou’s mentor is killed by a fantastic and elusive sea creature, the mythical “jaguar shark,” Zissou becomes obsessed with revenge. He plans to make his next film into a documentary showing his hunt for the shark and its ultimate destruction.
Masking his inability to grieve and heal his wound, Zissou unconsciously reverts into a 12-year-old boy’s fairytale world. Paradoxically, although Zissou’s films were revered for his imaginative explorations of the ocean as a benevolent place, now he sees the sea as a dangerous unknown, a shadowy source of suffering.
Zissou’s inner struggle comes to a head with the arrival of Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), who believes he is Zissou’s long-lost son. Zissou struggles to acknowledge Ned. “I always hated fathers,” he says, “and I never wanted to be one.”
Ned’s arrival provides a profound context for Zissou’s reluctance to step into an authentic fatherhood role.
Zissou tries to include Ned in his vendetta against the shark, but he ends up competing with Ned for the attention of Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett), a pregnant single-mother and reporter covering the voyage. Jane becomes a focal point for Zissou to assert his faux-masculine dominance while alternately serving as an outlet for his repressed and self-conscious inner child.
Along the way, Zissou battles pirates and rescues his too-suave rival, Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum), once married to Zissou’s ex-wife, Eleanor (Angelica Houston), who holds the secret about the oceanographer’s possible fathership of Ned.
In a tragic turn, after Zissou and Ned board a helicopter to search for the Jaguar shark, the aircraft malfunctions and crashes. Ned is killed. Symbolically, Zissou’s opportunity to forge a real relationship with his would-be son is sabotaged by his refusal to let go of his own derelict past.
However, thanks to Ned’s encouragement and faith in Zissou as his father, the adventurer continues his voyage into the depths. He finally confronts the creature, this time with more reconciliatory intentions.
Following his ordeal, Zissou at last can truly grieve. He grieves for the loss of Ned. He grieves for the loss of his mentor. He also grieves over the childhood wound he’d been repressing, the wounding that had inhibited him from fully accepting Ned as his son.
At this moment, Zissou’s transformation is realized. He accepts the shadows of his past and surrenders his fairytale facade. He is now empowered to offer authentic mentorship to Werner, a real-life 12-year-old boy we’d met at the start of the film. Zissou also feels empowered to show compassion toward Jane and her unborn child.
These generous gestures effectively nurture the magic and imagination of youth that Zissou was missing when the film began. While he seemed to lose every battle he fought, his inner victory ultimately marks Zissou’s progression from wounded child to mature father and mentor.
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Morgan Toane: Originally from Edmonton, Alberta, Morgan lives in Montreal, Quebec. A poet, writer, and rambler, Morgan graduated in English and Creative Writing from the University of Alberta. His fiction has been published in The Western Producer, and he currently writes for the blog Artistic Things. |
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