Word: zissouã
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...delivers a performance that is powerfully understated. Audiences are used to seeing this actor play an aging man dealing with his lost youth (see “Rushmore,” “Lost in Translation,” or “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou??). “Broken Flowers” allows him to reprise this role...
...plot-driving filler. Utterly superfluous segments about the expedition’s financial woes cheekily squander the ample talents of actor Michael Gambon (Gosford Park). To decry an Anderson film for its sideline prattling may be missing the point, but where seemingly nonsensical scenes might have served to amplify Zissou??s tragic failings or better explain his often whimsical actions, they instead pack the film with tedious dialogue...
...stabs deceptive employer Royal Tenenbaum in the stomach, then loyally drags him to safety. But multi-dimensional characters are nowhere to be found aboard the cramped Life Aquatic, where the equivalent manservant role of Klaus Daimler is played with one-note efficiency by Willem Dafoe. Owen Wilson (as Zissou??s alleged illegitimate offspring) and Anjelica Huston (as Zissou??s dedicated wife) play their roles with such maddeningly detached insincerity that even their supposedly emotive scenes are one thin ironic line away from bad line readings at community theater auditions...
...actor is never quite invested enough in the performance to support it. In creating Zissou, Murray cleanly cuts out the weary heartache of Lost in Translation’s Bob Harris to offer a shell of a man too sterile and smarmy to lend any real gravitas to Zissou??s gradual realization of his own mid-life impotence...
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