PHOTO BY PHILIPPE ANTONELLO

'SAIL-ORS

Jump to a bit later: "It's very lifelike," Ned (Owen Wilson) says, regarding a crude, impressionistic oil rendering of a man who may be his father. The could-be pater is Steve Zissou (Bill Murray), pop oceanographer (emphasis on the former) and maker of "hit" documentaries on undersea life. His films-within-this-film are partially 1970s relics – the fakey staging, cheesy subplots, and 5/4-time bossa nova, wa-wa soundtracks – that tenderly send up and eventually ditch Cousteau's style. As Life Aquatic commences, Steve's latest work is badly received by almost everyone at an Italian film festival. The film depicts his best friend, Esteban du Plantier (Seymour Cassel), disappearing, eaten by an unseen "jaguar shark." At the post-screening Q&A, Steve vows revenge.

Ned emerges from the murky past to claim something, feeling out a bond that's thus far consisted of two letters and numerous distant denials. Before long, he joins Steve and his crew – among them a tender German second hand (an uproarious Willem Dafoe), an Australian radarman (Noah Taylor), an Italian editor, an Indian cameraman, and a Brazilian safety expert (Seu Jorge) who plays Bowie tunes in Portuguese – on their blackout-prone ship, Belafonte. Anjelica Huston, as in Anderson's previous The Royal Tenenbaums, is an estranged goddess-anchor (alongside pregnant journalist Cate Blanchett), a fragile voice of reason and concern.

We're in scary, uncharted waters here, but there's no reason to flinch. Many critics, or at least some of the arch jargon-slingers, think Anderson has finally gone too far into his own whizzing head. Don't believe it. His latest splay of irradiated "father" and "child" squabbles, wide-screen comic ambiguities, nifty-gnarly pop scoring, and anachronistic gumball-hued funk has snagged his worst reviews and has been butchered as airless, inane, elitist, precious, hermetic, "anally" conceived, and underrealized. In other words, his very deep, dreamy surface tactics are facilely, safely dismissed, rather than savored and dreamed about. Better to slag Anderson than risk being seen as elitist in championing him – like when a Cecil Beaton-esque festival director tells Steve his film is successful because the audience didn't get it.

This not getting it is a noble risk Anderson perpetually runs. I've yet to sit in a movie theater – through multiple screenings of his films – and not encounter an audience whose laughter wasn't scattershot, choked, off-kilter, or even random. Seemingly spiky and assured at first, his meanings multiply and shift, some hiding in plain sight, and the whole film tends to change emotional speeds on subsequent viewings. Par for the course is the pop score, which flings up daft oblique relationships, the starkest of which are Mark Mothersbaugh, the baroque composer, quarreling with 1977 Devo and the bobbing up of Bowie "father" Scott Walker ("30th Century Man") just before a main character dies. As François Truffaut once said of Nicholas Ray, Anderson is "aiming less for the traditional all-around success ... than at giving each shot a certain emotional quality." Or as that critic's own spiritual father, André Bazin, noted of Anthony Mann: "When his camera pans, it breathes."

No matter how ancient or arcane the dialogue and design, all is bright and dustless – lines flecked with wombats, rum cannonballs, sucker-punch etiquette, Daydream Johnnys, surveys of expired Adidas shoes, ancient computers, and rusted hulls – each element exists now, sitting together and embossed in a painful (and intolerant), stark, Futura font-ed present tense. Anderson dreamers revel in some past, some semi-understood glory, waking up to solitary disappointment and eventually reaching out to another person, but not before imploding or self-sabotaging. The danger here, one that most commentators have fallen into, is confusing the director's obsession with failures and comebacks with the movie's achievement.

Awash in moving, neat, antinatural color, Aquatic is obsessed with chaotic feelings covered by order and uniforms ("Get him a red cap and a Speedo"). Anderson inverts father-son auteurs Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis (whose 1961 comedy The Ladies' Man is architecturally quoted in Aquatic's cutaway ship), denying the sheer weirdness of our real-life modern world in favor of a hallucination of the pop past. His camera keeping things smashed at eye level, the better to notice a lurch into handheld bobble, a swaggeringly flat set piece, hypermagnified cutaways, a speed change, and midair swoops, and all of it supporting and amplifying the character breakdowns, mishearings, contradictions, misspellings (the "visa de conrole" number on the jaguar shark episode), in-jokes (Steve's script girl sharing the same name as Anderson's), and an impossibly buoyant superdesign. It probably won't win him any new fans. Those blind to these charms probably will never see it and might find themselves eventually saying of Anderson's peculiar allure what Steve says of Ned: "I'm sorry I didn't acknowledge your existence for all those years. It won't happen again." 'The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou' opens Sat/25 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.