The Life Aquatic with Bill Murray

Wes Anderson is one of the most amazing filmmakers of my generation, precisely because everyone else totally sucks so bad that someone had to step up and show us what half of a brain could do with a great camera and a mediocre story. In his early movies, everyone is kind of depressed and weird, and in The Life Aquatic, it's like all these characters decided to go on a boat trip together. They're hunting down an enormous shark and trying to get revenge, and we can't help notice the blatant reference to the greatest American novel ever: The Catcher in the Rye. Anderson is so influenced by Salinger that you start to get the feeling that any of these characters has just been thrown out of private school, begun a nervous breakdown and is walking around NYC at Christmas time, only it's that they're on a boat in the ocean and it's not winter. If Holden Caufield were interested in fish, this would be his movie.

Anderson has one other major influence, and that's Caddy Shack. In that seminal film, Bill Murray plays a droll, un-self-conscious greens keeper who, by being so bored with it all, embodies the absurd uselessness of high-brow leisurely pursuits like putting a golf-ball into a hole. In The Life Aquatic with Bill Murray, there is absolutely no difference. It's just they're on a boat in the ocean and instead of golfing, they're doing ocean research, another leisurely, and pretty boring, pursuit rich people do to help pass their otherwise meaningless time on the planet. Bill Murray plays himself, as he always does, and it's a little hard not to imagine him accidently saying something about golf while in the submarine or on the boat.

They do find the shark, by the way, so now you don't have to go see this movie because you know what's going to happen. Instead you can just rent Caddy Shack and pretend that they're on a boat in the ocean. Or rent The Royal Pain in the Tannenbaums and imagine that they're playing golf instead of hanging out doing nothing at all.

Wes Anderson has really sewn together a quilt, and I think you know exactly what I mean. "Four!"