 What appears on the screen in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou may seem as odd as its title to critics, but they seem to agree that its star, Bill Murray, counterbalances the oddities with a subtle, beguiling performance that lifts it into Oscar contention. A.O. Scott writes of his performance in the New York Times: "His doughy face fringed by a grizzled Ernest Hemingway beard and topped by a red watch cap, Mr. Murray turns tiny gestures and sly, off-beat line readings into a deadpan tour-de-force, at once utterly ridiculous and curiously touching." Carina Chocana in the Los Angeles Times remarks that "if you've already glued a statuette of Bill Murray, patron saint of inchoate yearning and exquisite disappointment, to your dashboard, nothing about The Life Aquatic will disappoint." Eleanor Ringel Gillespie in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution clearly has mixed feelings about the film. Her conclusion: "Sometimes sinks, but mostly goes along swimmingly." Quite a number of critics, however, are not so generous. Christy Lemire of the Associated Press writes that writer-director "Anderson is drowning in superficial details. He's too obsessed with minutiae at the expense of substantive character development." Jan Stuart in Newsday comments that the movie "launches with enormous promise, then sinks into a quagmire of misfired humor and misbegotten characters." And under the heading "Deep Letdown," Jack Matthews of the New York Daily News writes that the movie "launches with enormous promise, then sinks into a quagmire of misfired humor and misbegotten characters." |
