..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

The Life Aquatic
With Steve Zissou
Directed by Wes Anderson
Touchstone

You see, there's this #2 pencil.

Or it may not be a pencil. It might be trompe l'oeil, a tricked-up rendition of a pencil that's been drawn into the indentation of a pencil well in a kid's lap desk. It could be either, or both, it's at the top of a key frame in a childhood flashback scene in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a pencil stenciled with the stars of night, white and precise and beautiful along its length. It brought me to tears, this perfectly perpendicular vision, this sweet innocent perfect hyper-designed and overdetermined object.

Immediately, I think: I wonder where I could buy it. I want to possess this pencil, this sharp little objet.

Wes Anderson's latest basket of fruity doodles and marzipan jive for the crayon-eating autistic inside all of us is a big bright toybox, a gift to the makers of DVD extras and coffee-table books and obsessive websites worldwide: take, annotate, this is my dream. More than a concatenation of memorable characters and motices, a franchiseable novelty shop concept seems to be playing out, one which might sit nicely in San Francisco, next door to Dave Eggers' pirate supply shop.

There's sort of a plot to The Life Aquatic, but there's no urgency, only a vaudeville succession of murmured oddball bits, played mostly in widescreen frames built around the production design rather than the characters. Bill Murray's the star, for goshsakes, that should be an occasion for a few dozen barks of simple joy. A master of underplaying, Murray seems directed not to under-underplay in his role as Steve Zissou, a failed middle-aged filmmaker and ocean explorer surrounded by people with funny names and strange accents. Too exhausted to hardly ever speak above a sigh, he still has a mission: Ahab-like, he seeks revenge on a "jaguar shark" that ate his best friend. ("Lost in Direction," let's call it.)

Anderson has told interviewers that Jacques Cousteau and ocean adventures have always fascinated him, and there are a few fanciful touches here, mostly quick glimpses of apocryphal fish, stop motion animated by Henry Selick. But weirdly, Anderson demonstrates an uncanny lack of love of water, no sense of immersion or seasickness, little notion of expanse, only a neat flipbook of Not-Such-Wonders. When he attempts to expand his style, such as an extended Die Hard-style shootout at sea with Zissou in only a powder blue Speedo in a bathrobe, liberating a ship from Filipino pirates, the effect is listless.

Anderson's questionable gift is for fetish and repetition and a font called Futura. One scene even finds Zissou designing stationery. ("I even hate the typeface" is a line you don't hear very often in an American movie.) The favorite soda pops of a Texas boy not quite grown-up? Center a composition of three animated crabs beside an RC bottle top; when you have a shot and bloodied hostage, show them wearing an "I'm a Pepper" t-shirt. Are interns funny? The ship's stuffed with them, from the crisply logo'ed "University of North Alaska," and so's the dialogue: "Do the interns all get Glocks?"; "Hey, intern, get me a Campari, will you?"; "Don't point that gun at him, he's an unpaid intern."

For its almost two-hour slog, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou feels arbitrary rather than inspired. There have been directors like the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger whose artificing produced great depths of emotion, in movies like Stairway to Heaven (aka A Matter of Life and Death) and The Red Shoes. Tellingly, here's how co-screenwriter Noam Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming) describes his collaboration with Anderson to Filter magazine: "We met every day at an Italian restaurant in Soho. We both keep odd hours, so we'd always plan to meet at 1pm then someone would show up late… But we'd stay through dinner, and just keep working on the script. We ended up using a lot of the items on the menu to name the fish. Some of the regular patrons' names ended up in there as well which we used for the crew members and such."

And such? And how! Let's add up some more of the such: There are funny lines. Bunch of actors you've probably heard of: Cate Blanchett (pregnant, charming), Owen Wilson (painfully put-on Z-movie-style Kentucky accent), Bud Cort (old Bud Cort), Michael Gambon (hey, his hair's really long), Willem Dafoe (not funny, even with unfunny German accent), Noah Taylor (sort of present). There are memorable moments. Strange ones, too, such as the scene with the shivering, cringing three-legged whippet that Jeff Goldblum thwacks with a rolled-up musical score. While it seems decadent anytime a director under 50 makes a movie that's about making movies, you still have to admire Zissou's autocritique (which could be a shrug from Anderson and Baumbach, both directors), "Obviously, people are going to think I'm a showboat and a bit of a prick."

At movie's end, there's a touching shot of more than half a dozen characters inside a submersible vehicle, and they descend into suboceanic Henry Selick-land. There's a suggestion of communal effort in the idea and composition that doesn't come through elsewhere. Hip to the marrow, the movie's emotional revelation scored at great length to the unearthly beauty of a Sigur Ros song called "Staralfur," a patch of ethereral beauty consisting of the Icelandic group warbling lyrics like these: "Ntt yfir himininn, bl ntt yfir mr, horff-inn t um gluggann, minn me hendur, faldar undir kinn, hugsum daginn minn, dag og gr, bl nttftin kla mig , beint upp rm, breii mjku sngina, loka augunum."

The lush, luscious phonetic nonsense (to most of the world's ears) makes a keen metaphor for this entire doomed mission: if Anderson could provide that sort of delicious chill, even secondhand through appropriating beauty from another medium, as in way the music works in the shot in The Royal Tenenbaums of raccoon-eyed Gwyneth Paltrow advancing toward the camera to a Nico song, that would be something. (No comment on the relentless succession of acoustic covers of David Bowie songs in Portuguese.)

But, all things considered, it's the arty date movie of the season, and as foreplay goes, it probably can't be beat with the right person to exchange significant looks and rolls of the eyes.

- Ray Pride