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jere7myWe watched The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou last night. There was a lot more ennui and detachment than I expected. It's a difficult movie to get in sync with; I spent the first half distancing myself from the characters, because they seemed so unlikeable and incomprehensible—and they seemed keen to distance themselves from me. There was a glass shield between us and them. Whenever anything funny happened, it was almost contemptuous, like a mug to the audience.
As the movie progressed, it started to become clearer what they were doing. It opens with a documentary frame, and ostensibly follows the filming of the next Zissou documentary. These "documentaries" are partially staged, we quickly learn—and that blurring of reality and artifice extends to the characters' emotions, and thus their interactions with the audience. Is the movie we're watching as fake and staged as the documentary they're filming? If so, what's actually going on beneath the surface?
The obviously unreal stop-motion fishes and stagey cutaway boat set contribute as well, and there are scenes that, while we're watching them, could just as well be reality or fantasy. Lines are delivered with such flatness that it's impossible to detect sarcasm, deception, or honesty. We the audience, like Cate Blanchett's reporter, are digging for the truth underneath a mountain of detachment. By the time the movie ends, any small moment of truth we encounter—true documentary footage, true emotion—has a peculiar resonance, because it rises above the fakery. That makes the fakery worth it...I think. It requires a lot of patience on the part of the audience, and a lot of people won't have the patience, but I found myself understanding—and almost liking—Stevezi in the final scenes, though the emotion was barely brushed on.
Incidentally, Seu Jorge's performances of David Bowie—by himself, on an acoustic guitar, in Portuguese—are worth a rental, even if you don't have the patience for the rest of the characters.
(And, yes, the closing credits are an homage to Buckaroo Banzai. Wonder what Jeff Goldblum was thinking...)
As the movie progressed, it started to become clearer what they were doing. It opens with a documentary frame, and ostensibly follows the filming of the next Zissou documentary. These "documentaries" are partially staged, we quickly learn—and that blurring of reality and artifice extends to the characters' emotions, and thus their interactions with the audience. Is the movie we're watching as fake and staged as the documentary they're filming? If so, what's actually going on beneath the surface?
The obviously unreal stop-motion fishes and stagey cutaway boat set contribute as well, and there are scenes that, while we're watching them, could just as well be reality or fantasy. Lines are delivered with such flatness that it's impossible to detect sarcasm, deception, or honesty. We the audience, like Cate Blanchett's reporter, are digging for the truth underneath a mountain of detachment. By the time the movie ends, any small moment of truth we encounter—true documentary footage, true emotion—has a peculiar resonance, because it rises above the fakery. That makes the fakery worth it...I think. It requires a lot of patience on the part of the audience, and a lot of people won't have the patience, but I found myself understanding—and almost liking—Stevezi in the final scenes, though the emotion was barely brushed on.
Incidentally, Seu Jorge's performances of David Bowie—by himself, on an acoustic guitar, in Portuguese—are worth a rental, even if you don't have the patience for the rest of the characters.
(And, yes, the closing credits are an homage to Buckaroo Banzai. Wonder what Jeff Goldblum was thinking...)
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Date: 2005-08-28 09:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-29 05:07 am (UTC)