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THE clue lies in the Japanese name that has been adopted for them around the world: tsunami. Formed from the characters for harbour and wave, and commemorated in the 19th-century woodblock print by Hokusai that decorates so many books and articles about the subject, the word shows that these sudden, devastating waves have mainly in the past occurred in the Pacific Ocean, ringed as it is by volcanoes and earthquake zones. Thanks to one tsunami in 1946 that killed 165 people, mainly in Hawaii, the countries around the Pacific have shared a tsunami warning centre ever since. Those around the Indian Ocean have no such centre, being lucky enough not to have suffered many big tsunamis before and unlucky enough not to count the world's two biggest and most technologically advanced economies, the United States and Japan, among their number.
So when, on December 26th, the world's strongest earthquake in 40 years shook the region, with its epicentre under the sea near the northernmost tip of the Indonesian archipelago, there was no established mechanism to pass warnings to the countries around the ocean's shores. There would have been between 90 and 150 minutes in which to broadcast warnings by radio, television and loudspeaker in the areas most affected, the Indonesian province of Aceh, Sri Lanka and the Indian chain of the Andaman and Nicobar islands. Had such warnings been broadcast then many of the tens of thousands of lives lost would have been saved. How many, nobody can know, for the task of evacuation would have been far from easy in many of these crowded, poor and low-lying coastal communities. Equally, though, it will probably never be known exactly how many people have died (see article). Whereas in many disasters the initial estimates of fatalities prove too high, the opposite is occurring in this case.
Making a virtue out of disaster
The question of whether there should now be some sort of seismic and even tsunami warning system established for the Indian Ocean is not currently the most urgent one, however. After all, big tsunamis are thankfully extremely rare occurrences. There is no reason in science to believe that they are becoming any more likely. The most urgent questions concern how much humanitarian aid can be mustered by the world's richer countries and how it can be distributed.
The Indian Ocean tsunami has been called the world's worst ever natural disaster. In terms of cold statistics, that is wrong, even as the estimated death toll climbs well past 50,000. Other earthquakes have killed more, especially in poor and populous countries such as China: probably 600,000 or more in Tangshan in 1976, and 200,000 or so on two occasions in the 1920s. Iran lost an estimated 50,000 people to a quake in 1990 and a further 26,000 in Bam exactly a year ago to the day, on December 26th 2003. It is not even the Indian Ocean's deadliest disaster, for cyclones have often brought worse, most notoriously in 1970 when the then new state of Bangladesh lost about 500,000 people.
What is special about this tsunami is the geographical extent of the devastation and the number of countries affected. Earthquakes produce terrible consequences, but normally of a highly localised sort. This time, particularly in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India and Thailand, the damage stretches across thousands of miles and involves millions of people. That produces a huge logistical challenge for international organisations and aid agencies: how to get relief supplies and, later, reconstruction assistance to so many places at more or less the same time. Much more of the money and planning will have to be devoted to planes, helicopters, trucks and supply lines than in “normal” disasters and relief efforts.
But let not everything about this terrible event feel bad. For in that very geographical challenge lies also an opportunity, one that comes in three main forms. The first is that the involvement in the disaster of so many resorts favoured by tourists from rich countries in the West and the richer parts of north-east Asia has given it even more prominence in those countries than the sheer horror of the fatalities would have produced. Such selfish distortions are regrettable in theory—who noticed while millions were dying in Congo's wars?—but in practice they might as well be exploited. It ought to be possible to raise far more in charitable donations from individuals and organisations in rich countries for relieving this disaster than for single-country earthquakes or floods, for example.
The second is that the countries around the Indian Ocean itself should, on this occasion, feel motivated enough to assist each other, poor though all of them are, and to accept each other's help. Those that were less affected and those on neighbouring seas, including the Arab countries and around the Pacific, must surely be persuadable that they too could easily have been affected by such an act of God, whichever God it may be considered to have been.
That sense of mutual vulnerability brings us back to the question of warning systems and to the third way in which this disaster could be turned into an opportunity. Money and complacency are two reasons why no tsunami warning system exists for the Indian Ocean. But the region also suffers from a political fear of co-operation. Suspicions and mistrust between many of the countries bordering the ocean, and between those in the seismically turbulent region beyond, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and elsewhere, mean that habits of cross-border co-operation are weak. Even the exchange of seismic data is meagre, to say the least, let alone interchange on more politically and economically charged topics.
In 1999, when Greece and Turkey both suffered earthquakes in rapid succession, the urge to assist each other led to a considerable thaw in long-frosty relations. To build a warning system, including processes to share seismic data and to pass on alerts expeditiously, would not be an expensive operation. Nor would it prevent natural disasters in the future, such is the power and unpredictability of nature. But it could be a useful, non-controversial contribution to the easing of old political tensions—and to saving some lives.
New Yorker:
No one who survived the tsunami that crashed into South India on December 26th describes it as a wave. The fishermen and villagers who live along the coast, and whose homes and livelihoods were swept away, speak of a “wall of water.” The wall came without warning, rising suddenly to more than fifteen feet, and, along with cars and refrigerators and cattle and jewelry, claimed a death toll that defied comprehension as it escalated through the week. By Thursday night, more than ten thousand were dead in South India, and well over a hundred thousand across Asia, making it one of the most devastating natural disasters in history.
The wave came later. It was a wave of people, crawling inland with babies and baskets piled on their heads and shoulders, searching for higher ground. These refugees settled into makeshift camps, in a band between the flooded coast and the hinterland. Just a few miles inland from the ocean, however, life seemed to go on normally. On the morning the tsunami hit, I was at home in the town where I grew up, Auroville, an international utopian community outside the old French colonial city of Pondicherry, near the coast. I first learned about the tsunami while surfing the Internet. That day, in my town, people went out to dinner, played cricket and soccer, and, just like residents of Tokyo or New York, watched the tragedy unfold primarily as a distant media spectacle. In a restaurant, just a few hours after the tsunami had struck, I encountered a dozen patrons in their Sunday best carrying on with their luncheon.
Over the next few days, as fears of aftershocks and more tsunamis subsided, that zone of normalcy began widening, creeping back toward the shore. A reverse wave of migration took place, with coastal residents returning to their ruined villages to salvage their belongings and take advantage of government aid. The roads were filled once again, this time with men and women in bandages and donated clothes, many clutching white cardboard sheets—their medical records. At refugee camps that had been set up a safe distance from the coast, the tents were taken down, the temporary kitchens disassembled. The tragedy was not exactly erased but had at least been quarantined, consigned to its origins.
On Wednesday, three days after the disaster, some residents had returned to the South Indian fishing village of Kalapet, near Pondicherry. Three men, one absent-mindedly delousing a child in his lap, sat on the remains of a boat and, glassy-eyed, surveyed the destruction. A few days before, the beach had been littered with corpses: at least twenty people had died in this village, and another fifty in surrounding hamlets; several more were missing. Now the corpses were in the morgue and the beach was a tangle of fishing nets, television sets, and punched-out cupboards. The thatch roofing strewn across the sand was drier and, at least on parts of the waterfront, piled in neat bundles. Motorboats that had been thrown up against coconut trees were back on the ground, their engines wrenched out and lying a few feet away.
Karunakaran, one of the men sitting on the boat, said that the village had been empty right after the tsunami, but now it was filling up again. Several political dignitaries—from Pondicherry, from New Delhi—had visited; they had promised a lot. Homes would be rebuilt, compensation would be paid to the injured. Families of the dead were each to get a hundred thousand rupees ($2,300), a princely sum in these parts. But, in order to claim the money, families had to produce a corpse—and many of the dead had been swept out to sea.
There was little sign on the Kalapet beach of the mass relief exercise being reported in the media. A few workers were loading a truck with the thatch bundles; a nun from the local mission, which had lost two children, was staring at the ocean with the same vacant look as the men. I couldn’t make out any international presence—no United Nations or Red Cross or Oxfam.
Up the road, in the government high school, a cluster of concrete one- and two-story buildings organized around a courtyard, the relief effort was somewhat more vigorous. More than a thousand refugees, primarily children but also their adult relatives, were crammed into the classrooms, and the walls were draped with clothes hung up to dry. The toilets were overflowing. In parts of the school, the ground was strewn with feces and plastic bags and clumps of fermenting rice. A sanitation worker threw handfuls of bleaching powder on piles of waste.
In the courtyard, amid the bleach clouds, the children chased each other. One was blowing into a kazoo; another played a harmonica. The headmaster surveyed them sourly. “There’s too much food,” he declared. “We’re being forced to throw it away.” He said that the government had been delivering batches of rice to the school every fifty minutes. Of course, most villages in the vast area struck by the tsunami weren’t nearly as fortunate as Kalapet. Parts of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and parts of Indonesia, where the death toll is much higher, had not even been reached by aid workers at the end of last week.
unicef estimated that children accounted for at least a third of the dead across Asia, and nearly all the students in the Kalapet school had lost a friend. But a teacher who had been summoned back to duty over the holidays marvelled at their cheerfulness. It was true: the schoolyard-turned-refugee camp was like a playground. Crowds gathered around a mobile water tank, chattering eagerly and tapping the pipes as government workers transferred the water to the school’s tanks. Girls and boys, freed from parental oversight, eyed each other nervously and giggled.
On a second-floor veranda overlooking the courtyard, some boys were chewing sugarcane and acting out roles from Tamil movies. One teen-ager climbed over the parapet and jumped to the ground, a drop of more than a dozen feet. “What are you doing?” the girls yelled. “You’ll break your legs.”
“People lost their lives—what do I care if I break my legs?” the boy shouted back, and he sauntered off, swinging his hips and singing a song from a movie.
The day before, local authorities had hosted a health camp at the school. The headmaster said that the relief work was going very well. Soon, he said, he would be conducting a household survey to account for the dead. At the back of the compound, two workers from the education department were going through the school’s attendance records, trying to build a preliminary list of the missing.
On Thursday afternoon, the wave of people headed inland again. The Indian government had issued a warning that another tsunami might be on the way. Scenes from just a few days earlier were replayed: entire families, mothers and fathers and grandparents and babies, suitcases in hand, making their way inland under the harsh midday sun. Motorcycles were streaking in from the coast, four (or even five) riders per bike.
The new tsunami, which local police said was approaching at three hundred m.p.h., was expected to hit the coast in another hour or two. Stories circulated that it had already reached Sri Lanka and other parts of India.
By midafternoon, it appeared that the rumors were wrong—an overreaction, perhaps, by a nervous government that had been criticized for not issuing a warning about the first wave. Down by the beach, a motorcycle mechanic tinkered with a gearbox and said he wasn’t planning to leave his workshop. But thousands had already left for higher ground. Up the road, in a refugee camp that had been deserted just that morning, it was all starting again.
Outside the high school, on the East Coast Road, there were fewer ambulances now, and more government welfare vehicles, than there had been in recent days. A policeman gave a boy some candy, and a man shouted into a public telephone that his brother was in the hospital, he had lost everything, and he needed to postpone his meeting.
Most of the shops were shuttered, but for the local electronics repairman business was brisk. His storefront was piled with television sets and videocassette players. A couple stood watching as the shop owner took apart a DVD player. The DVD was still inside, and the components were caked with mud.
“Go home,” the owner told the couple. “We’ll call you if we can fix it.”
“Where should I go?” the woman said, laughing. “I don’t have a home.”
FILM
I saw three movies lately, one excellent, one OK, one not-so-good at all (Life Aquatic).
MILLION DOLLAR BABY
Chicago Sun-Times
Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" is a masterpiece, pure and simple, deep and true. It tells the story of an aging fight trainer and a hillbilly girl who thinks she can be a boxer. It is narrated by a former boxer who is the trainer's best friend. But it's not a boxing movie. It is a movie about a boxer. What else it is, all it is, how deep it goes, what emotional power it contains, I cannot suggest in this review, because I will not spoil the experience of following this story into the deepest secrets of life and death. This is the best film of the year.
Eastwood plays the trainer, Frankie, who runs a seedy gym in Los Angeles and reads poetry on the side. Hilary Swank plays Maggie, from southwest Missouri, who has been waitressing since she was 13 and sees boxing as the one way she can escape waitressing for the rest of her life.
Otherwise, she says, "I might as well go back home and buy a used trailer and get a deep fryer and some Oreos." Morgan Freeman is Scrap, who was managed by Frankie into a title bout. Now he lives in a room at the gym and is Frankie's partner in conversations that have coiled down through the decades. When Frankie refuses to train a "girly," it's Scrap who convinces him to give Maggie a chance: "She grew up knowing one thing. She was trash."
These three characters are seen with a clarity and truth that is rare in the movies. Eastwood, who doesn't carry a spare ounce on his lean body, doesn't have any padding in his movie, either: Even as the film approaches the deep emotion of its final scenes, he doesn't go for easy sentiment, but regards these people, level-eyed, as they do what they have to do.
Some directors lose focus as they grow older. Others gain it, learning how to tell a story that contains everything it needs and absolutely nothing else. "Million Dollar Baby" is Eastwood's 25th film as a director, and his best. Yes, "Mystic River" is a great film, but this one finds the simplicity and directness of classical storytelling; it is the kind of movie where you sit very quietly in the theater and are drawn deeply into lives that you care very much about.
Morgan Freeman is the narrator, just as he was in "The Shawshank Redemption," which this film resembles in the way the Freeman character describes a man who became his lifelong study. The voice is flat and factual: You never hear Scrap going for an affect or putting a spin on his words. He just wants to tell us what happened. He talks about how the girl walked into the gym, how she wouldn't leave, how Frankie finally agreed to train her, and what happened then. But Scrap is not merely an observer; the film gives him a life of his own when the others are offscreen. It is about all three of these people.
Hilary Swank is astonishing as Maggie. Every note is true. She reduces Maggie to a fierce intensity. Consider the scene where she and Scrap sit at a lunch counter, and Scrap tells how he lost the sight in one eye, how Frankie blames himself for not throwing in the towel. It is an important scene for Freeman, but I want you to observe how Swank has Maggie do absolutely nothing but listen. No "reactions," no little nods, no body language except perfect stillness, deep attention and an unwavering gaze.
There's another scene, at night driving in a car, after Frankie and Maggie have visited Maggie's family. The visit didn't go well. Maggie's mother is played by Margo Martindale as an ignorant and selfish monster. "I got nobody but you, Frankie," Maggie says. This is true, but do not make the mistake of thinking there is romance between them. It's different, and deeper than that. She tells Frankie a story involving her father, whom she loved, and an old dog she loved, too.
Look at the way the cinematographer, Tom Stern, uses the light in this scene. Instead of using the usual "dashboard lights" that mysteriously seem to illuminate the whole front seat, watch how he has their faces slide in and out of shadow, how sometimes we can't see them at all, only hear them. Watch how the rhythm of this lighting matches the tone and pacing of the words, as if the visuals are caressing the conversation.
It is a dark picture overall: a lot of shadows, many night scenes, characters who seem to recede into private fates. It is a "boxing movie" in the sense that it follows Maggie's career and has several fight scenes. She wins from the beginning, but that's not the point; "Million Dollar Baby" is about a woman determined to make something of herself, and a man who doesn't want to do anything for this woman, and will finally do everything.
The screenplay is by Paul Haggis, who has worked mostly on TV but with this earns an Oscar nomination. Other nominations, possibly Oscars, will go to Swank, Eastwood, Freeman, the picture and many technicians -- and possibly the original score composed by Eastwood, which always does what is required and never distracts.
Haggis adapted the story from Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner, a 2000 book by Jerry Boyd, a 70-year-old fight manager who wrote it as "F.X. Toole." The dialogue is poetic but never fancy. "How much she weigh?" Maggie asks Frankie about the daughter he hasn't seen in years. "Trouble in my family comes by the pound." And when Frankie sees Scrap's feet on the desk: "Where are your shoes?" Scrap: "I'm airing out my feet." The foot conversation continues for almost a minute, showing the film's patience in evoking character.
Eastwood is attentive to supporting characters, who make the surrounding world seem more real. The most unexpected is a Catholic priest who is seen, simply, as a good man; movies all seem to put a negative spin on the clergy these days. Frankie goes to mass every morning and says his prayers every night, and Father Horvak (Brian F. O'Byrne) observes that anyone who attends daily mass for 23 years tends to be carrying a lot of guilt. Frankie turns to him for advice at a crucial point, and the priest doesn't respond with church orthodoxy but with a wise insight: "If you do this thing, you'll be lost, somewhere so deep you will never find yourself." Listen, too, when Haggis has Maggie use the word "frozen," which is what an uneducated backroads girl might say, but is also the single perfect word that expresses what a thousand could not.
Movies are so often made of effects and sensation these days. This one is made of three people and how their actions grow out of who they are and why. Nothing else. But isn't that everything?
IN GOOD COMPANY
New York Times
he 26-year-old actor Topher Grace has the narrow build and jumpy bones of a young man still growing into his adult body, so much so that even when standing at rest, he seems poised to take a leap forward. That makes him an ideal fit for the nimble, engagingly lightweight drama "In Good Company," in which a young executive, having been bumped up the ladder too fast, first loses, then finds his footing by standing on the sturdy shoulders of a seasoned professional played with winning solidity by Dennis Quaid.
Mr. Grace's Carter Duryea, a shark who's made his dubious reputation selling cellphones to children, has been promoted to run the advertising department of a magazine with the resonant name of Sports America. The executive whom Carter is meant to make redundant is the 51-year-old Dan Foreman. A ruggedly appealing adult man who brings out the best in everyone lucky enough to land inside his periphery, Dan has a picture-perfect family and the loyalty of those who work for him. An unabashedly old-fashioned masculine type, the kind of character Mr. Quaid has been slow-cooking to perfection over the years and which, on American screens at least, has lately gone missing.
Written and directed by Paul Weitz, "In Good Company" is a gently revisionist fairy tale about good versus evil set on the battlefield of contemporary corporate culture, a site of our leading blood sport. Mostly, though, the movie is about men. Men without fathers, men without sons, men with wives who work and make them feel like less than a man and men with wives who, like Dan's wife, Ann (Marg Helgenberger), give them the gift of both an exquisitely preserved figure and a fertile womb. For Dan, who rises at 4:30 a.m. to go to work so he can sustain his beautiful family in their beautiful home, who conducts business with a firm handshake and a squared jaw, being a man isn't a roll of the genetic dice, an accident of birth; it's a calling.
In many respects, "In Good Company" is very much of a piece with Mr. Weitz's last feature, "About a Boy," which he directed with his brother, Chris Weitz. (The two produced this new film themselves.) Based on the Nick Hornby novel, "About a Boy" traces the long-delayed maturation of a single man who, having resisted adulthood and all that it implies (namely, the steady love of one woman), is suddenly forced into caring for a young boy. A similar dynamic drives "In Good Company." Soon after Carter bumps Dan from his position and corner office, the older man discovers that his new boss can't hack it. Not simply because Carter lacks the requisite professional experience, but also and principally because he's just a kid rattling inside grown-up armor.
After Carter becomes involved with Dan's daughter, Alex (Scarlett Johansson), this nascent father-son relationship grows more complicated, if only on the surface. A sweetly superficial interlude, the couple's affair fizzes rather than sizzles, mostly because the love that really matters here isn't between Alex and Carter, but Carter and Dan. Like Ann, who holds up a flattering mirror to Dan, Alex exists mostly as a reflection of her lover's and her father's deeper selves. This is more of an observation than a strong complaint. The focus of "In Good Company" is decidedly on the men. But this is one of those unusual American movies in which the women, though manifestly marginal to the story's core meaning, have inner lives that linger long after the characters have served their purpose.
"In Good Company" lacks both the emotional sting and the bright pop-culture snap of "About a Boy," as well as Mr. Hornby's carefully cultivated irony, but it makes for an agreeable solo directing debut. Mr. Weitz has an easy commercial style that entertains without insult, and on the evidence of both this and his last film he has found a theme (masculinity and its complaints) that fits him like a glove. If the screenplay veers toward the overly schematic, with Dan and Carter's lifelines forming geometrically calibrated parallel tracks, Mr. Weitz makes certain that the precise architecture of the story neither imprisons his characters nor dampens his sense of play. I don't believe for a single second how Mr. Weitz ends his fairy tale, but I mean it as a compliment to say that I wish I did.
THE LIFE AQUATIC
New York Times
There may be filmmakers more idiosyncratic than Wes Anderson -- Jean-Luc Godard is still alive and shooting, after all -- but there is no one who can match Mr. Anderson's devotion to his own idiosyncrasy. In his last movie, ''The Royal Tenenbaums'' (2001), the director and his writing partner, Owen Wilson, confected a parallel-universe Manhattan of moody tennis players, neurasthenic playwrights and rambling mansions, burying a touching story of child prodigies and prodigal parents in tchotchkes and bric-a-brac. At the time, some of us who had admired Mr. Anderson's first two films, ''Bottle Rocket'' and ''Rushmore,'' complained that his delicate combination of whimsy and emotional purity was sliding into preciousness.
''The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,'' based on a script by Mr. Anderson and Noah Baumbach, goes even further, conjuring an imaginary world that encompasses wild ocean-faring technologies and fanciful species of computer-animated fish. Rather than tacking toward the shore of realism, Mr. Anderson blithely heads for the open sea of self-indulgent make-believe. As someone who was more annoyed than charmed by ''Tenenbaums,'' I should have been completely exasperated with ''The Life Aquatic,'' with its wispy story and wonder-cabinet production design, but to my surprise I found it mostly delightful.
Some of this has to do with Bill Murray, who occupies nearly every frame of the picture, usually sighing and frowning right in the middle of the screen. Mr. Anderson favors static, head-on compositions stuffed with beguiling details, and Mr. Murray holds still for him, allowing the audience's eyes to peruse his carefully arranged surroundings.
The actor's quiet, downcast presence modulates the antic busyness that encircles him, and his performance is a triumph of comic minimalism. Like Gene Hackman's Royal Tenenbaum, Mr. Murray's Steve Zissou is a flawed, solipsistic patriarch, though his defining emotion is not intemperate anger but a vague, wistful tristesse. 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.
Zissou is a famous ocean explorer whose undersea adventures have less to do with scientific research than with pop-culture branding. He makes movies, administers a vast fan club, and keeps his eye out for merchandising opportunities. When we first meet him, at the premiere of his latest ''Life Aquatic'' documentary, he is beset with troubles. His trusty sidekick (Seymour Cassel) has been eaten by a mysterious shark (on which Zissou vows Ahab-like revenge) and Eleanor, his wife and business partner (Anjelica Huston), seems to be gravitating back into the orbit of her ex-husband, Alastair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum), Zissou's slick, reptilian arch-rival. Meanwhile, a nosy reporter (Cate Blanchett) talks her way onto Zissou's boat, joined by Ned Plimpton (Mr. Wilson), a guileless, pipe-smoking young man from Kentucky who may or may not be the captain's long-lost illegitimate son.
Having established a rather hectic set of narrative premises (and I have provided only a partial list), Mr. Anderson proceeds to treat them casually, dropping in swatches of action and feeling when they suit his atmospheric purposes. He is less a storyteller than an observer and an arranger of odd human specimens. ''The Life Aquatic'' is best compared to a lavishly illustrated, haphazardly plotted picture book -- albeit one with frequent profanity and an occasional glimpse of a woman's breasts -- the kind dreamy children don't so much read start to finish as browse and linger over, finding fuel for their own reveries.
There is, to be sure, a certain willful, show-off capriciousness in this approach to filmmaking, but there is also a great deal of generosity. Mr. Anderson and Mr. Baumbach have built a magpie's nest of borrowed and reconditioned cultural flotsam -- from Jacques Cousteau to Tintin and beyond -- but the purpose of their pastiche is less to show how cool they are than to revel in, and share, a childish delight in collecting and displaying strange and enchanting odds and ends. If you allow yourself to surrender to ''The Life Aquatic,'' you may find that its slow, meandering pace and willful digressions are inseparable from its pleasures.
Not that it's all fun and games. The bright colors and crazy gizmos are washed over with a strange, free-floating pathos that occasionally attaches itself to the characters, but that seems in the end to be more an aspect of the film's ambience than of its dramatic situations. Zissou's world-weary melancholy, the utter seriousness with which he goes about being absurd, contains an element of inconsolable nostalgia. He is a child's fantasy of adulthood brought to life, and at the same time an embodiment of the longing for a return to childhood that colors so much of grown-up life.
In my ideal cinémathèque, ''The Life Aquatic'' would play on a permanent double bill with ''The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.'' Mr. Anderson and Stephen Hillenburg, Mr. Squarepants's creator, share not only a taste for nautical nonsense, but also a willingness to carry the banner of unfettered imaginative silliness into battle against the tyranny of maturity.
They also both understand the sublimity that well-chosen pop music can impart even to throwaway moments. The seaborne contrivances of ''The Life Aquatic'' may make you a little queasy, but the soundtrack is impossible to argue with. It consists mainly of early David Bowie songs -- ''Queen Bitch,'' ''Space Oddity,'' ''Five Years'' and the like -- sung samba style, in lilting Brazilian Portuguese, by Seu Jorge. Like much else in the movie, these songs seem to come from another world: one which is small, crowded and, on its own skewed terms, oddly perfect.
MUSIC LYRICS
Passing Afternoon
Iron & Wine
"There are times that walk from you like some passing afternoon
Summer warmed the open window of her honeymoon
And she chose a yard to burn but the ground remembers her
Wooden spoons, her children stir her Bougainvillea blooms
There are things that drift away like our endless, numbered days
Autumn blew the quilt right off the perfect bed she made
And she's chosen to believe in the hymns her mother sings
Sunday pulls its children from the piles of fallen leaves
There are sailing ships that pass all our bodies in the grass
Springtime calls her children until she let's them go at last
And she's chosen where to be, though she's lost her wedding ring
Somewhere near her misplaced jar of Bougainvillea seeds
There are things we can't recall, Blind as night that finds us all
Winter tucks her children in, her fragile china dolls
But my hands remember hers, rolling around the shaded ferns
Naked arms, her secrets still like songs I'd never learned
There are names across the sea, only now I do believe
Sometimes, with the window closed, she'll sit and think of me
But she'll mend his tattered clothes and they'll kiss as if they know
A baby sleeps in all our bones, so scared to be alone"
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TsunamiHelp.blogspot.com
Economist reflections:
THE clue lies in the Japanese name that has been adopted for them around the world: tsunami. Formed from the characters for harbour and wave, and commemorated in the 19th-century woodblock print by Hokusai that decorates so many books and articles about the subject, the word shows that these sudden, devastating waves have mainly in the past occurred in the Pacific Ocean, ringed as it is by volcanoes and earthquake zones. Thanks to one tsunami in 1946 that killed 165 people, mainly in Hawaii, the countries around the Pacific have shared a tsunami warning centre ever since. Those around the Indian Ocean have no such centre, being lucky enough not to have suffered many big tsunamis before and unlucky enough not to count the world's two biggest and most technologically advanced economies, the United States and Japan, among their number.
So when, on December 26th, the world's strongest earthquake in 40 years shook the region, with its epicentre under the sea near the northernmost tip of the Indonesian archipelago, there was no established mechanism to pass warnings to the countries around the ocean's shores. There would have been between 90 and 150 minutes in which to broadcast warnings by radio, television and loudspeaker in the areas most affected, the Indonesian province of Aceh, Sri Lanka and the Indian chain of the Andaman and Nicobar islands. Had such warnings been broadcast then many of the tens of thousands of lives lost would have been saved. How many, nobody can know, for the task of evacuation would have been far from easy in many of these crowded, poor and low-lying coastal communities. Equally, though, it will probably never be known exactly how many people have died (see article). Whereas in many disasters the initial estimates of fatalities prove too high, the opposite is occurring in this case.
Making a virtue out of disaster
The question of whether there should now be some sort of seismic and even tsunami warning system established for the Indian Ocean is not currently the most urgent one, however. After all, big tsunamis are thankfully extremely rare occurrences. There is no reason in science to believe that they are becoming any more likely. The most urgent questions concern how much humanitarian aid can be mustered by the world's richer countries and how it can be distributed.
The Indian Ocean tsunami has been called the world's worst ever natural disaster. In terms of cold statistics, that is wrong, even as the estimated death toll climbs well past 50,000. Other earthquakes have killed more, especially in poor and populous countries such as China: probably 600,000 or more in Tangshan in 1976, and 200,000 or so on two occasions in the 1920s. Iran lost an estimated 50,000 people to a quake in 1990 and a further 26,000 in Bam exactly a year ago to the day, on December 26th 2003. It is not even the Indian Ocean's deadliest disaster, for cyclones have often brought worse, most notoriously in 1970 when the then new state of Bangladesh lost about 500,000 people.
What is special about this tsunami is the geographical extent of the devastation and the number of countries affected. Earthquakes produce terrible consequences, but normally of a highly localised sort. This time, particularly in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India and Thailand, the damage stretches across thousands of miles and involves millions of people. That produces a huge logistical challenge for international organisations and aid agencies: how to get relief supplies and, later, reconstruction assistance to so many places at more or less the same time. Much more of the money and planning will have to be devoted to planes, helicopters, trucks and supply lines than in “normal” disasters and relief efforts.
But let not everything about this terrible event feel bad. For in that very geographical challenge lies also an opportunity, one that comes in three main forms. The first is that the involvement in the disaster of so many resorts favoured by tourists from rich countries in the West and the richer parts of north-east Asia has given it even more prominence in those countries than the sheer horror of the fatalities would have produced. Such selfish distortions are regrettable in theory—who noticed while millions were dying in Congo's wars?—but in practice they might as well be exploited. It ought to be possible to raise far more in charitable donations from individuals and organisations in rich countries for relieving this disaster than for single-country earthquakes or floods, for example.
The second is that the countries around the Indian Ocean itself should, on this occasion, feel motivated enough to assist each other, poor though all of them are, and to accept each other's help. Those that were less affected and those on neighbouring seas, including the Arab countries and around the Pacific, must surely be persuadable that they too could easily have been affected by such an act of God, whichever God it may be considered to have been.
That sense of mutual vulnerability brings us back to the question of warning systems and to the third way in which this disaster could be turned into an opportunity. Money and complacency are two reasons why no tsunami warning system exists for the Indian Ocean. But the region also suffers from a political fear of co-operation. Suspicions and mistrust between many of the countries bordering the ocean, and between those in the seismically turbulent region beyond, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and elsewhere, mean that habits of cross-border co-operation are weak. Even the exchange of seismic data is meagre, to say the least, let alone interchange on more politically and economically charged topics.
In 1999, when Greece and Turkey both suffered earthquakes in rapid succession, the urge to assist each other led to a considerable thaw in long-frosty relations. To build a warning system, including processes to share seismic data and to pass on alerts expeditiously, would not be an expensive operation. Nor would it prevent natural disasters in the future, such is the power and unpredictability of nature. But it could be a useful, non-controversial contribution to the easing of old political tensions—and to saving some lives.
New Yorker:
No one who survived the tsunami that crashed into South India on December 26th describes it as a wave. The fishermen and villagers who live along the coast, and whose homes and livelihoods were swept away, speak of a “wall of water.” The wall came without warning, rising suddenly to more than fifteen feet, and, along with cars and refrigerators and cattle and jewelry, claimed a death toll that defied comprehension as it escalated through the week. By Thursday night, more than ten thousand were dead in South India, and well over a hundred thousand across Asia, making it one of the most devastating natural disasters in history.
The wave came later. It was a wave of people, crawling inland with babies and baskets piled on their heads and shoulders, searching for higher ground. These refugees settled into makeshift camps, in a band between the flooded coast and the hinterland. Just a few miles inland from the ocean, however, life seemed to go on normally. On the morning the tsunami hit, I was at home in the town where I grew up, Auroville, an international utopian community outside the old French colonial city of Pondicherry, near the coast. I first learned about the tsunami while surfing the Internet. That day, in my town, people went out to dinner, played cricket and soccer, and, just like residents of Tokyo or New York, watched the tragedy unfold primarily as a distant media spectacle. In a restaurant, just a few hours after the tsunami had struck, I encountered a dozen patrons in their Sunday best carrying on with their luncheon.
Over the next few days, as fears of aftershocks and more tsunamis subsided, that zone of normalcy began widening, creeping back toward the shore. A reverse wave of migration took place, with coastal residents returning to their ruined villages to salvage their belongings and take advantage of government aid. The roads were filled once again, this time with men and women in bandages and donated clothes, many clutching white cardboard sheets—their medical records. At refugee camps that had been set up a safe distance from the coast, the tents were taken down, the temporary kitchens disassembled. The tragedy was not exactly erased but had at least been quarantined, consigned to its origins.
On Wednesday, three days after the disaster, some residents had returned to the South Indian fishing village of Kalapet, near Pondicherry. Three men, one absent-mindedly delousing a child in his lap, sat on the remains of a boat and, glassy-eyed, surveyed the destruction. A few days before, the beach had been littered with corpses: at least twenty people had died in this village, and another fifty in surrounding hamlets; several more were missing. Now the corpses were in the morgue and the beach was a tangle of fishing nets, television sets, and punched-out cupboards. The thatch roofing strewn across the sand was drier and, at least on parts of the waterfront, piled in neat bundles. Motorboats that had been thrown up against coconut trees were back on the ground, their engines wrenched out and lying a few feet away.
Karunakaran, one of the men sitting on the boat, said that the village had been empty right after the tsunami, but now it was filling up again. Several political dignitaries—from Pondicherry, from New Delhi—had visited; they had promised a lot. Homes would be rebuilt, compensation would be paid to the injured. Families of the dead were each to get a hundred thousand rupees ($2,300), a princely sum in these parts. But, in order to claim the money, families had to produce a corpse—and many of the dead had been swept out to sea.
There was little sign on the Kalapet beach of the mass relief exercise being reported in the media. A few workers were loading a truck with the thatch bundles; a nun from the local mission, which had lost two children, was staring at the ocean with the same vacant look as the men. I couldn’t make out any international presence—no United Nations or Red Cross or Oxfam.
Up the road, in the government high school, a cluster of concrete one- and two-story buildings organized around a courtyard, the relief effort was somewhat more vigorous. More than a thousand refugees, primarily children but also their adult relatives, were crammed into the classrooms, and the walls were draped with clothes hung up to dry. The toilets were overflowing. In parts of the school, the ground was strewn with feces and plastic bags and clumps of fermenting rice. A sanitation worker threw handfuls of bleaching powder on piles of waste.
In the courtyard, amid the bleach clouds, the children chased each other. One was blowing into a kazoo; another played a harmonica. The headmaster surveyed them sourly. “There’s too much food,” he declared. “We’re being forced to throw it away.” He said that the government had been delivering batches of rice to the school every fifty minutes. Of course, most villages in the vast area struck by the tsunami weren’t nearly as fortunate as Kalapet. Parts of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and parts of Indonesia, where the death toll is much higher, had not even been reached by aid workers at the end of last week.
unicef estimated that children accounted for at least a third of the dead across Asia, and nearly all the students in the Kalapet school had lost a friend. But a teacher who had been summoned back to duty over the holidays marvelled at their cheerfulness. It was true: the schoolyard-turned-refugee camp was like a playground. Crowds gathered around a mobile water tank, chattering eagerly and tapping the pipes as government workers transferred the water to the school’s tanks. Girls and boys, freed from parental oversight, eyed each other nervously and giggled.
On a second-floor veranda overlooking the courtyard, some boys were chewing sugarcane and acting out roles from Tamil movies. One teen-ager climbed over the parapet and jumped to the ground, a drop of more than a dozen feet. “What are you doing?” the girls yelled. “You’ll break your legs.”
“People lost their lives—what do I care if I break my legs?” the boy shouted back, and he sauntered off, swinging his hips and singing a song from a movie.
The day before, local authorities had hosted a health camp at the school. The headmaster said that the relief work was going very well. Soon, he said, he would be conducting a household survey to account for the dead. At the back of the compound, two workers from the education department were going through the school’s attendance records, trying to build a preliminary list of the missing.
On Thursday afternoon, the wave of people headed inland again. The Indian government had issued a warning that another tsunami might be on the way. Scenes from just a few days earlier were replayed: entire families, mothers and fathers and grandparents and babies, suitcases in hand, making their way inland under the harsh midday sun. Motorcycles were streaking in from the coast, four (or even five) riders per bike.
The new tsunami, which local police said was approaching at three hundred m.p.h., was expected to hit the coast in another hour or two. Stories circulated that it had already reached Sri Lanka and other parts of India.
By midafternoon, it appeared that the rumors were wrong—an overreaction, perhaps, by a nervous government that had been criticized for not issuing a warning about the first wave. Down by the beach, a motorcycle mechanic tinkered with a gearbox and said he wasn’t planning to leave his workshop. But thousands had already left for higher ground. Up the road, in a refugee camp that had been deserted just that morning, it was all starting again.
Outside the high school, on the East Coast Road, there were fewer ambulances now, and more government welfare vehicles, than there had been in recent days. A policeman gave a boy some candy, and a man shouted into a public telephone that his brother was in the hospital, he had lost everything, and he needed to postpone his meeting.
Most of the shops were shuttered, but for the local electronics repairman business was brisk. His storefront was piled with television sets and videocassette players. A couple stood watching as the shop owner took apart a DVD player. The DVD was still inside, and the components were caked with mud.
“Go home,” the owner told the couple. “We’ll call you if we can fix it.”
“Where should I go?” the woman said, laughing. “I don’t have a home.”
FILM
I saw three movies lately, one excellent, one OK, one not-so-good at all (Life Aquatic).
MILLION DOLLAR BABY
Chicago Sun-Times
Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" is a masterpiece, pure and simple, deep and true. It tells the story of an aging fight trainer and a hillbilly girl who thinks she can be a boxer. It is narrated by a former boxer who is the trainer's best friend. But it's not a boxing movie. It is a movie about a boxer. What else it is, all it is, how deep it goes, what emotional power it contains, I cannot suggest in this review, because I will not spoil the experience of following this story into the deepest secrets of life and death. This is the best film of the year.
Eastwood plays the trainer, Frankie, who runs a seedy gym in Los Angeles and reads poetry on the side. Hilary Swank plays Maggie, from southwest Missouri, who has been waitressing since she was 13 and sees boxing as the one way she can escape waitressing for the rest of her life.
Otherwise, she says, "I might as well go back home and buy a used trailer and get a deep fryer and some Oreos." Morgan Freeman is Scrap, who was managed by Frankie into a title bout. Now he lives in a room at the gym and is Frankie's partner in conversations that have coiled down through the decades. When Frankie refuses to train a "girly," it's Scrap who convinces him to give Maggie a chance: "She grew up knowing one thing. She was trash."
These three characters are seen with a clarity and truth that is rare in the movies. Eastwood, who doesn't carry a spare ounce on his lean body, doesn't have any padding in his movie, either: Even as the film approaches the deep emotion of its final scenes, he doesn't go for easy sentiment, but regards these people, level-eyed, as they do what they have to do.
Some directors lose focus as they grow older. Others gain it, learning how to tell a story that contains everything it needs and absolutely nothing else. "Million Dollar Baby" is Eastwood's 25th film as a director, and his best. Yes, "Mystic River" is a great film, but this one finds the simplicity and directness of classical storytelling; it is the kind of movie where you sit very quietly in the theater and are drawn deeply into lives that you care very much about.
Morgan Freeman is the narrator, just as he was in "The Shawshank Redemption," which this film resembles in the way the Freeman character describes a man who became his lifelong study. The voice is flat and factual: You never hear Scrap going for an affect or putting a spin on his words. He just wants to tell us what happened. He talks about how the girl walked into the gym, how she wouldn't leave, how Frankie finally agreed to train her, and what happened then. But Scrap is not merely an observer; the film gives him a life of his own when the others are offscreen. It is about all three of these people.
Hilary Swank is astonishing as Maggie. Every note is true. She reduces Maggie to a fierce intensity. Consider the scene where she and Scrap sit at a lunch counter, and Scrap tells how he lost the sight in one eye, how Frankie blames himself for not throwing in the towel. It is an important scene for Freeman, but I want you to observe how Swank has Maggie do absolutely nothing but listen. No "reactions," no little nods, no body language except perfect stillness, deep attention and an unwavering gaze.
There's another scene, at night driving in a car, after Frankie and Maggie have visited Maggie's family. The visit didn't go well. Maggie's mother is played by Margo Martindale as an ignorant and selfish monster. "I got nobody but you, Frankie," Maggie says. This is true, but do not make the mistake of thinking there is romance between them. It's different, and deeper than that. She tells Frankie a story involving her father, whom she loved, and an old dog she loved, too.
Look at the way the cinematographer, Tom Stern, uses the light in this scene. Instead of using the usual "dashboard lights" that mysteriously seem to illuminate the whole front seat, watch how he has their faces slide in and out of shadow, how sometimes we can't see them at all, only hear them. Watch how the rhythm of this lighting matches the tone and pacing of the words, as if the visuals are caressing the conversation.
It is a dark picture overall: a lot of shadows, many night scenes, characters who seem to recede into private fates. It is a "boxing movie" in the sense that it follows Maggie's career and has several fight scenes. She wins from the beginning, but that's not the point; "Million Dollar Baby" is about a woman determined to make something of herself, and a man who doesn't want to do anything for this woman, and will finally do everything.
The screenplay is by Paul Haggis, who has worked mostly on TV but with this earns an Oscar nomination. Other nominations, possibly Oscars, will go to Swank, Eastwood, Freeman, the picture and many technicians -- and possibly the original score composed by Eastwood, which always does what is required and never distracts.
Haggis adapted the story from Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner, a 2000 book by Jerry Boyd, a 70-year-old fight manager who wrote it as "F.X. Toole." The dialogue is poetic but never fancy. "How much she weigh?" Maggie asks Frankie about the daughter he hasn't seen in years. "Trouble in my family comes by the pound." And when Frankie sees Scrap's feet on the desk: "Where are your shoes?" Scrap: "I'm airing out my feet." The foot conversation continues for almost a minute, showing the film's patience in evoking character.
Eastwood is attentive to supporting characters, who make the surrounding world seem more real. The most unexpected is a Catholic priest who is seen, simply, as a good man; movies all seem to put a negative spin on the clergy these days. Frankie goes to mass every morning and says his prayers every night, and Father Horvak (Brian F. O'Byrne) observes that anyone who attends daily mass for 23 years tends to be carrying a lot of guilt. Frankie turns to him for advice at a crucial point, and the priest doesn't respond with church orthodoxy but with a wise insight: "If you do this thing, you'll be lost, somewhere so deep you will never find yourself." Listen, too, when Haggis has Maggie use the word "frozen," which is what an uneducated backroads girl might say, but is also the single perfect word that expresses what a thousand could not.
Movies are so often made of effects and sensation these days. This one is made of three people and how their actions grow out of who they are and why. Nothing else. But isn't that everything?
IN GOOD COMPANY
New York Times
he 26-year-old actor Topher Grace has the narrow build and jumpy bones of a young man still growing into his adult body, so much so that even when standing at rest, he seems poised to take a leap forward. That makes him an ideal fit for the nimble, engagingly lightweight drama "In Good Company," in which a young executive, having been bumped up the ladder too fast, first loses, then finds his footing by standing on the sturdy shoulders of a seasoned professional played with winning solidity by Dennis Quaid.
Mr. Grace's Carter Duryea, a shark who's made his dubious reputation selling cellphones to children, has been promoted to run the advertising department of a magazine with the resonant name of Sports America. The executive whom Carter is meant to make redundant is the 51-year-old Dan Foreman. A ruggedly appealing adult man who brings out the best in everyone lucky enough to land inside his periphery, Dan has a picture-perfect family and the loyalty of those who work for him. An unabashedly old-fashioned masculine type, the kind of character Mr. Quaid has been slow-cooking to perfection over the years and which, on American screens at least, has lately gone missing.
Written and directed by Paul Weitz, "In Good Company" is a gently revisionist fairy tale about good versus evil set on the battlefield of contemporary corporate culture, a site of our leading blood sport. Mostly, though, the movie is about men. Men without fathers, men without sons, men with wives who work and make them feel like less than a man and men with wives who, like Dan's wife, Ann (Marg Helgenberger), give them the gift of both an exquisitely preserved figure and a fertile womb. For Dan, who rises at 4:30 a.m. to go to work so he can sustain his beautiful family in their beautiful home, who conducts business with a firm handshake and a squared jaw, being a man isn't a roll of the genetic dice, an accident of birth; it's a calling.
In many respects, "In Good Company" is very much of a piece with Mr. Weitz's last feature, "About a Boy," which he directed with his brother, Chris Weitz. (The two produced this new film themselves.) Based on the Nick Hornby novel, "About a Boy" traces the long-delayed maturation of a single man who, having resisted adulthood and all that it implies (namely, the steady love of one woman), is suddenly forced into caring for a young boy. A similar dynamic drives "In Good Company." Soon after Carter bumps Dan from his position and corner office, the older man discovers that his new boss can't hack it. Not simply because Carter lacks the requisite professional experience, but also and principally because he's just a kid rattling inside grown-up armor.
After Carter becomes involved with Dan's daughter, Alex (Scarlett Johansson), this nascent father-son relationship grows more complicated, if only on the surface. A sweetly superficial interlude, the couple's affair fizzes rather than sizzles, mostly because the love that really matters here isn't between Alex and Carter, but Carter and Dan. Like Ann, who holds up a flattering mirror to Dan, Alex exists mostly as a reflection of her lover's and her father's deeper selves. This is more of an observation than a strong complaint. The focus of "In Good Company" is decidedly on the men. But this is one of those unusual American movies in which the women, though manifestly marginal to the story's core meaning, have inner lives that linger long after the characters have served their purpose.
"In Good Company" lacks both the emotional sting and the bright pop-culture snap of "About a Boy," as well as Mr. Hornby's carefully cultivated irony, but it makes for an agreeable solo directing debut. Mr. Weitz has an easy commercial style that entertains without insult, and on the evidence of both this and his last film he has found a theme (masculinity and its complaints) that fits him like a glove. If the screenplay veers toward the overly schematic, with Dan and Carter's lifelines forming geometrically calibrated parallel tracks, Mr. Weitz makes certain that the precise architecture of the story neither imprisons his characters nor dampens his sense of play. I don't believe for a single second how Mr. Weitz ends his fairy tale, but I mean it as a compliment to say that I wish I did.
THE LIFE AQUATIC
New York Times
There may be filmmakers more idiosyncratic than Wes Anderson -- Jean-Luc Godard is still alive and shooting, after all -- but there is no one who can match Mr. Anderson's devotion to his own idiosyncrasy. In his last movie, ''The Royal Tenenbaums'' (2001), the director and his writing partner, Owen Wilson, confected a parallel-universe Manhattan of moody tennis players, neurasthenic playwrights and rambling mansions, burying a touching story of child prodigies and prodigal parents in tchotchkes and bric-a-brac. At the time, some of us who had admired Mr. Anderson's first two films, ''Bottle Rocket'' and ''Rushmore,'' complained that his delicate combination of whimsy and emotional purity was sliding into preciousness.
''The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,'' based on a script by Mr. Anderson and Noah Baumbach, goes even further, conjuring an imaginary world that encompasses wild ocean-faring technologies and fanciful species of computer-animated fish. Rather than tacking toward the shore of realism, Mr. Anderson blithely heads for the open sea of self-indulgent make-believe. As someone who was more annoyed than charmed by ''Tenenbaums,'' I should have been completely exasperated with ''The Life Aquatic,'' with its wispy story and wonder-cabinet production design, but to my surprise I found it mostly delightful.
Some of this has to do with Bill Murray, who occupies nearly every frame of the picture, usually sighing and frowning right in the middle of the screen. Mr. Anderson favors static, head-on compositions stuffed with beguiling details, and Mr. Murray holds still for him, allowing the audience's eyes to peruse his carefully arranged surroundings.
The actor's quiet, downcast presence modulates the antic busyness that encircles him, and his performance is a triumph of comic minimalism. Like Gene Hackman's Royal Tenenbaum, Mr. Murray's Steve Zissou is a flawed, solipsistic patriarch, though his defining emotion is not intemperate anger but a vague, wistful tristesse. 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.
Zissou is a famous ocean explorer whose undersea adventures have less to do with scientific research than with pop-culture branding. He makes movies, administers a vast fan club, and keeps his eye out for merchandising opportunities. When we first meet him, at the premiere of his latest ''Life Aquatic'' documentary, he is beset with troubles. His trusty sidekick (Seymour Cassel) has been eaten by a mysterious shark (on which Zissou vows Ahab-like revenge) and Eleanor, his wife and business partner (Anjelica Huston), seems to be gravitating back into the orbit of her ex-husband, Alastair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum), Zissou's slick, reptilian arch-rival. Meanwhile, a nosy reporter (Cate Blanchett) talks her way onto Zissou's boat, joined by Ned Plimpton (Mr. Wilson), a guileless, pipe-smoking young man from Kentucky who may or may not be the captain's long-lost illegitimate son.
Having established a rather hectic set of narrative premises (and I have provided only a partial list), Mr. Anderson proceeds to treat them casually, dropping in swatches of action and feeling when they suit his atmospheric purposes. He is less a storyteller than an observer and an arranger of odd human specimens. ''The Life Aquatic'' is best compared to a lavishly illustrated, haphazardly plotted picture book -- albeit one with frequent profanity and an occasional glimpse of a woman's breasts -- the kind dreamy children don't so much read start to finish as browse and linger over, finding fuel for their own reveries.
There is, to be sure, a certain willful, show-off capriciousness in this approach to filmmaking, but there is also a great deal of generosity. Mr. Anderson and Mr. Baumbach have built a magpie's nest of borrowed and reconditioned cultural flotsam -- from Jacques Cousteau to Tintin and beyond -- but the purpose of their pastiche is less to show how cool they are than to revel in, and share, a childish delight in collecting and displaying strange and enchanting odds and ends. If you allow yourself to surrender to ''The Life Aquatic,'' you may find that its slow, meandering pace and willful digressions are inseparable from its pleasures.
Not that it's all fun and games. The bright colors and crazy gizmos are washed over with a strange, free-floating pathos that occasionally attaches itself to the characters, but that seems in the end to be more an aspect of the film's ambience than of its dramatic situations. Zissou's world-weary melancholy, the utter seriousness with which he goes about being absurd, contains an element of inconsolable nostalgia. He is a child's fantasy of adulthood brought to life, and at the same time an embodiment of the longing for a return to childhood that colors so much of grown-up life.
In my ideal cinémathèque, ''The Life Aquatic'' would play on a permanent double bill with ''The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.'' Mr. Anderson and Stephen Hillenburg, Mr. Squarepants's creator, share not only a taste for nautical nonsense, but also a willingness to carry the banner of unfettered imaginative silliness into battle against the tyranny of maturity.
They also both understand the sublimity that well-chosen pop music can impart even to throwaway moments. The seaborne contrivances of ''The Life Aquatic'' may make you a little queasy, but the soundtrack is impossible to argue with. It consists mainly of early David Bowie songs -- ''Queen Bitch,'' ''Space Oddity,'' ''Five Years'' and the like -- sung samba style, in lilting Brazilian Portuguese, by Seu Jorge. Like much else in the movie, these songs seem to come from another world: one which is small, crowded and, on its own skewed terms, oddly perfect.
MUSIC LYRICS
Passing Afternoon
Iron & Wine
"There are times that walk from you like some passing afternoon
Summer warmed the open window of her honeymoon
And she chose a yard to burn but the ground remembers her
Wooden spoons, her children stir her Bougainvillea blooms
There are things that drift away like our endless, numbered days
Autumn blew the quilt right off the perfect bed she made
And she's chosen to believe in the hymns her mother sings
Sunday pulls its children from the piles of fallen leaves
There are sailing ships that pass all our bodies in the grass
Springtime calls her children until she let's them go at last
And she's chosen where to be, though she's lost her wedding ring
Somewhere near her misplaced jar of Bougainvillea seeds
There are things we can't recall, Blind as night that finds us all
Winter tucks her children in, her fragile china dolls
But my hands remember hers, rolling around the shaded ferns
Naked arms, her secrets still like songs I'd never learned
There are names across the sea, only now I do believe
Sometimes, with the window closed, she'll sit and think of me
But she'll mend his tattered clothes and they'll kiss as if they know
A baby sleeps in all our bones, so scared to be alone"
posted by D @ 5:54 PM
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