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I remain unenchanted by Wes Anderson. If it were only Martin Scorsese lauding him, I could just chalk it off as an aberration, kinda like Roberto Rossellini liking Joshua Logan. But the guy has a fan base as inexplicably dedicated as Kevin Smith's or Takashi Miike's. I keep hearing of Anderson's style and humanism, though, as Sidney Lumet said, "style" is the most misused word since "love," and the director's feel for the soul of his characters reflected through their eccentricities has become more distanced from life with every passing film. His latest, the epic whimsyfest The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou is the Anderson movie per excellence, good news for his admirers who get cinematic hummers out of smirky compositions and emotions put cozily within quotation marks. Be that as it may, the film's self-fondling feyness tried my patience like no other since David O. Russell's spuriously meta I Heart Huckabees -- Anderson's brand of obscurantism is less malignant, but just as masturbatory. The plot, cooked up by Anderson and fellow hipster Noah Baumbach, is Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea reworked by narcissist elves. Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is another menopausal Anderson patriarch, a fiftysomething oceanographer whose movies on the undersea world have come to draw only indifference out of the cognoscenti. As the picture opens, our cut-rate Cousteau, red wool cap always in place, is getting ready to set off with the crew of his boat (the "Belafonte") and hunt down the mythical jaguar shark that swallowed his ol' chum. His mock-Moby Dick journey gets complicated by pirate raids, competition from slick nemesis Jeff Goldblum and, most notably, an estranged grown son (Owen Wilson), with whom he bonds and, in a reprise of the Rushmore triangle, competes over the affections of tagalong, pregnant British reporter Cate Blanchett. There's also Willem Dafoe as a Teutonic deckhand, an unearthed Bud Cort (who's gone from unformed youth to creepy middle-age with nothing in between), Seu Jorge doing David Bowie songs in Portuguese, and stop-motion critters swimming around. I rather liked the introduction of the "Belafonte," with the ship sliced sideways and the camera traveling from observatory to kitchen to sauna -- cute, though the dollhouse strategy was already used far more wittily in The Ladies' Man and Tout Va Bien. Cuteness, sadly, is all there is to Anderson, since his various themes (fractured clans, disillusion, loss, nostalgia) are evaded via horizontal sprawls of supposedly beguiling oddness that celebrate nothing more than the director's alleged cleverness. Jean Renoir may be his model, but Anderson's archly desiccated universe is closer to René Clair's rarified works, complete with one-quirk-per-character preciousness: thus, Murray smokes pot, Wilson has a Southern-gentleman accent, and Blanchett, uncanny as Kate Hepburn in The Aviator, gets forced here to oh-so-adorably skirt profanity to avoid soiling her unborn baby's ears. (As Murray's wife, poor Anjelica Huston doesn't even get a quirk, just brown cigarettes.) Faux-innocence can only go so far, though, and Anderson seems to be trying to craft an entire aesthetic out of oddball irony. The Life Aquatic sinks like a stone.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet is, like Anderson, a director who revels in gleefully insistent stylistics and terminal whimsy. Exhaustingly inventive, his films have the shallow beauty of surface bustle and CGI-fueled crayons that flood the eyes as much as they numb the mind. Equally bedeviled by artificial cleverness, he at least is generous with his toys -- the joyous malice of Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children (both co-directed with former partner Marc Caro) boil over with funhouse contraptionism, and his sole Hollywood foray so far, Alien: Resurrection, was actually an intriguing addition to the series. Whatever their flaws, these movies give the feeling of a director wide awake at the wheel, using effects not so much to capture reality as to invent reality in the Terry Gilliam fabulist tradition. In Amélie, Jenet's 2001 international smash hit, the wise-guy cuteness that runs throughout his movies was taken off its leash, and the screen clotted -- so much sumptuous retro-taffy, all of it synthetic, tube-fed. A Very Long Engagement, Jeunet's adaptation of Sébastien Japrisot's elephantine WWI novel, reenlists his Amélie gamine Audrey Tautou, though hopes of a reprise of that movie's comfy eye-candy are dashed off right at the opening credits, with Angelo Badalamenti's brooding score lamenting the horror that's to come. The time is 1917, and a tracking shot through the muddy trenches and blown-off faces of the front just about screams Paths of Glory. Five soldiers are about to be punished for self-mutilation (cue montage of palms being perforated), among them Manech (Gaspard Ulliel, the impressive young actor from Strayed). The prisoners are pushed onto No Man's Land for certain death, but to Mathilde (Tautou), his fiancée back home, Manech somehow still lives. Stubbornly hopeful, with a fetching bum leg and melancholic tuba, she sets out to piece together her vanished paramour's whereabouts through a myriad of prying snoops, astringent widows and shellshocked grunts.
"If Manech were dead, Mathilde would know." On goes the narration, but Jeunet is too enraptured by the film's visuals to summon up the wondrously resuscitating love of Frank Borzage, whose own 1927 Seventh Heaven emotionally trumps the fussiness of A Very Long Engagement. The tangled narrative funnels the horrors of war carnage through the suffering gaze of women, from Tautou's fragile moxie to Jodie Foster's practical severity to Marion Cotillard's film-stealing Corsican avenger, yet the movie dotes more lovingly over the contrasts between the sepia of civilian warmth and the horrific battlefront hues of faded uniforms and dried blood. (This is the kind of picture where a looming hydrogen zeppelin, which some genius stored inside a makeshift hospital for mangled victims, explodes into a pulverizing fireball that turns dozens of lives to ashes, and somehow all I could feel was not how horrible it was, but how prettily the sequence was designed.) Jeunet's extravagance, like Anderson's cuteness, swamps the notion of expressive mise en scène by corseting rather than liberating the spirit. The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and A Very Long Engagement (who comes up with these titles?) make for an illuminating double bill on how oppressive style becomes in the hands of con men.
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