What has happened to the Bill Murray we have come to cherish? The man who once made us painfully laugh before sending us falling to the floor in movies such as Caddyshack, Stripes, Ghostbusters, and Groundhog Day has yet again abandoned his senseless and sarcastic humor for a more obscure and subtle style he employed in his most recent films Rushmore and Lost in Translation.
Murray takes the lead role in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou as Steve Zissou, the leader of an undersea documentary team—Team Zissou—composed of the most incompetent and worthless individuals ever to walk this Earth.
The movie’s bizarre opening appropriately establishes the ridiculous nature of this Jacque Cousteau spoof as Zissou, shown describing his last excursion to colleagues, uses South Park-like animation to describe the scene of a lustrous fluorescent red snapper that precedes the appearance of a giant leopard shark which subsequently devours Zissou’s long-time partner Esteban.
Zissou, obviously depressed and delirious, begins to have his life collapse around him as his funding is cut, his wife and “brains” of Team Zissou Eleanor (Anjelica Huston) leaves him for rival researcher Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum), and forgotten son Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson) arrives.
This film moves slowly, as did Murray’s last features Rushmore and Lost in Translation. It appears as though the once celebrated Murray has thrown caution to the wind. His new dark humor seems to be saying to the Academy and all audiences that this is who he is, and if you don’t like it, screw you.
Overall, The Life Aquatic is one of those movies that is better the second time around. You have to be in a mood to laugh and you will have to think to laugh at some of Murray’s crude and obscure humor. The movie was solid, but I left the theater pondering the same question as when I entered: Where is the old Bill Murray?
